Raised by the Fox

by J Walker Bell

  ************************************************************

  “Good morning, Andy. Are you ready to begin your lessons for the day?”

  Zartron looks at me benignly. His arms are folded across his wrinkled grey suit. The fedora he is always wearing looks particularly stupid today.

  “You look particularly stupid today, Zartron”, I tell him. Zartron smiles faintly.

  “Ready to begin?” He asks again, unruffled by my insult.

  I look at the child’s space chariot that I am sitting in, its electronic screens presently dormant, but ready to come alive with a thought from me. Around me thousands of stars glow, suspended in the blackness of space, each one of them waiting to tell me its secrets. Zartron stands incongruously outside the confines of the chariot, spoiling the image of a ship alone in space. It’s an old error he never bothered to fix. Every day it’s the same thing; boring, boring, boring.

  I am almost nine years old, and my systems are still designed for a kid. Dad hasn’t done an upgrade in megacycles. Zartron is the kind of name a kid would think of, the name I gave him when he was a new neural intelligence Dad designed specially for me. Zartron coded the space chariot our first year together. We fought fantasy aliens and I learned about the stars he displayed for me. I just wasn’t up to playing the same games again.

  “Zartron, scan the Directory and see if Ramone is receiving.” I try to be nonchalant and firm at the same time. Technically, Zartron should do whatever I tell him, but Dad has him programmed with all sorts of protective idiocies. I can’t do anything about his programming, but I have learned how to keep him from chiding me; most of the time, anyway.

  “Wouldn’t you rather try one of your study subjects?”

  “No, I want to see Ramone.”

  Zartron was silent while he scanned the Directory. Ramone wasn’t always easy to find. “Ramone is streaming with the FringeChips,” Zartron said finally. “Is it your wish to join them?” His tone was disapproving.

  “Did Ramone give me an address code?”

  “Yes.”

  Hmmm. If the FringeChips were advertising their location they couldn’t be up to too much trouble. Maybe it would be all right to go along for awhile. Ramone, at least, liked me; I think. The rest of the gang are pretty scary. They could stream, however, to sectors I’ll never see on Gov field trips or even with Dad. Dad wouldn’t like it if I went, though. I’d get this serious lecture about how dangerous streaming can be. He’d tell me all the stats on how many people have been getting crashed or wiped just minding their own business on the Net. Dad is really soft on most things, but he gets pretty irrational about streaming. Yeah, I like Ramone, but he’s different when he’s with the FringeChips. I’m not scared, of course. Maybe I should just tell Dad I was asked and didn’t go. He’d like that. Maybe he’d take me out for awhile. Yeah.

  “Forget Ramone, Zartron, I’ve got other things to do.”

  “Very well. Would you like to continue with your lessons?”

  “No, I would not, and stop bugging me about them, okay?”

  “Okay, Andy.”

  He was really starting to become a pain about those lessons. I really do like Zartron, but he’s old and he needs a major redesign. He never gets excited, never tells me anything interesting, and is always bugging me about school.

  “Andy, please indicate next connect.”

  “All right!” What a nag! A guy can’t think in peace around here. What do I want to do? Maybe Dad has time to see me.

  “Zartron, I want to talk to Dad!”

  “He’s working, Andy.”

  “I know. Load it anyway. If he’s busy I’ll just talk to Sara.”

  “As you wish.”

  The familiar form of Dad’s lobby popped up around me, leaving Zartron behind. I used to hang around Dad’s office lobby when I was smaller, playing games with Zartron while waiting for Dad’s clients to arrive. There were never more than one or two, even if I spent the whole day there. Dad explained that persona assembly is a very individualistic thing, and that his clients compensated him well for that exclusivity. Dad’s words exactly. Dad never mentioned by name any of his clients, but I knew some of them from Dad’s days at the hospital, and others, more famous, from the VidBoard. They were accustomed to seeing me hanging around and sometimes talked to me while they were waiting to see Dad.

  “Hi, Sara!” I holler at Dad’s secretary. She jumps as she always does.

  “Andy, I’m going to have your father install a tell-tale on you so you can’t do that,” she threatens. She shakes a long nailed finger at me from behind her desk, but she smiles.

  I like Sara. She’s been Dad’s secretary since I was a baby. “Is Dad busy?” I asked her.

  “Of course, it’s the middle of the day, Hun.” I made a face at her. Dad always had time for me. Sara relented. “Well, you timed your visit just right. He has a client due this cycle, but he’s free at the moment. Shall I tell Dr. Nordstrum that you’re here?” she teased.

  I didn’t get a chance to tease Sara back, because Dad’s next client chose that moment to boot into the office – early. Sara gave me an apologetic look as she notified Dad that his client had arrived. She mentioned that I was here, too, but I knew Dad felt that it was very discourteous to keep a client waiting. I know it wasn’t Sara’s fault, but I couldn’t help glaring at her a little for teasing me and making me lose my chance to see Dad. I gave the client lady an even icier stare. In this day of instantaneous travel and of always knowing exactly what time it was, how come some people still insisted on showing up early for appointments? So what if the lady had to wait a few minutes? Couldn’t Dad tell I really needed to see him? I wanted to tell him I had turned down a trip in the Net with the FringeChips. I wanted him to take me into the Net for awhile. I wanted to be with him.

  I was starting to sound like a crybaby, and it made me mad. When Zartron popped in and began bugging me about my lessons again, I was in no mood to listen to him. Dad wouldn’t see me. He didn’t care what I did, as long as I was out of the way. Well, I didn’t need Dad to see the Net. I asked Zartron if I’d missed the rendezvous with Ramone, and when he told me I hadn’t, I wouldn’t let him argue me out of going.

  “I’m going, Zartron,” I said, making myself sound decisive. I could not give up a chance to go Net streaming. “Pop up the address and then get lost. I’ll let you know when I want you.” There, that should teach him to pester me about school!

  “As you wish.” Zartron disabled without a complaint. I should have known. I’ve never been able to make him mad.

  I wasn’t sure what environment the address code would retrieve, since I forgot to ask Zartron before telling him to enable it, but I figured it would be one of the public environments where the FringeChips usually hung out. I knew Zartron would have checked to make sure it was a viable address, anyway, so I wasn’t concerned about crashing because of a non-existent address, but I was surprised to see the Net, which is rarely addressed directly, pop up around me.

  Being in the Net is like floating at the center of a vast, empty universe. There is no sound and there is nothing to see but the palest of pastels interwoven like the casual strokes of an artist’s brush, the whole mass moving languidly in indecipherable patterns. My skin felt electrified, every nerve alert, sensitive to the barest feel of what moved in here: The Stream; the blood of the Net; the touch of clouds.

  I had time before the FringeChips were likely to show up; they would probably keep me waiting long past the rendezvous time, anyway. I was more or less stuck at this point, since it takes a lot of concentration and practice to move any distance in the Net; practice I didn’t have. It was disconcerting standing in what looked like mid-air, though, so I looked for the Interrupt that I knew must be nearby.

  Interrupts were the only true landmarks in the Net. They were easily accessible from outside the Net and provided the interface necessar
y between local environments and Central Systems. Other Interrupts, which the FringeChips like to use, existed primarily for maintenance. Interrupts were diabolically difficult to spot from within the Net without costly special locator subroutines. They were the doors in and out of the Net. Dad said they had no true physical appearance, but the mind’s eye saw them as something familiar – a button, a knob, a key; something incongruously normal. Dad could spot an Interrupt even without the locator sub-routines.

  I couldn’t see it. No matter how hard I tried. It all looked the same. Disgusted with myself, I pulled up a chair, so to speak, and sat down, swinging my feet back and forth absently. There is a lot of random binary code floating around in the net. If you know a little about programming, it is possible to construct localized subroutines representing simple things like an invisible chair to sit in. I might even have been able to create a visual as well, but I was more interested in just sitting and thinking. I didn’t want to be mad at Dad anymore, especially not with the glory of the Net all around me, so I thought about Dad and my first lesson about the Net.

  We were in Dad’s office, a dated environment of clusters of computer printouts, disks, and computer equipment overwhelming every flat surface. I recognized some of the newer equipment only because Dad used them on me when he gave me a checkup. It was all just for show, of course. Dad said once he didn’t revise his office environment routine because it annoyed his modern colleagues. Dad pulled up a visual on the display in his office. It was a visual from Organic Maintenance, an off-limits area that was not Net addressable because it was a physical place and not a program. I wondered how one went there, but Dad didn’t discuss that. No one would want to visit that place anyway. There were rows upon rows of rectangular boxes. The ceiling was full of winking lights. Each box contained a real human body. The boxes were the centerpiece of the Cryogenic-Mesh Sustenance System. Dad zoomed in on one box in particular, asking if I wanted to see what my own body looked like. But, that was too eerie. Seeing that box with my body filling the screen scared me more than anything and I was glad to see it whisked away. He switched to another anonymous box. You couldn’t see the body itself. There was too much silvery mesh. There was no mass of cables and no strange devices huddled around the box. There was nothing but the cryo unit itself, resting on the floor and the monitor lights watching from above. It was actually very peaceful, in a morbid kind of way, as if seeing the place you’ll go when you die.

  That’s totally wrong, of course, but I’ve never been able to shake that feeling. I think Dad was disappointed. It was Ramone who told me that most of the people who knew about the cryo rooms called them “the Crypts”.

  Dad shows his clients the Crypts because there, it was impossible to deny other truths. Physical reality is the Crypts. It is not a person’s persona or the environment programmed for the personas. Most people do not like this view. That is why Dad’s clientele is small, but exclusive. These clients want to retain that kernel of truth about their actual existence.

  Information about the Crypts is not classified, but the Gov doesn’t go out of its way to advertise either. Like many people, probably, the reality of the Net is all the reality they want. This is why Dad had to leave the hospital, and why he won’t call himself a doctor, as his colleagues do. Most people are terrified of having their hidden memories (“safeguarded” memories, the Gov says) resurrected. The fear of relearning the physical life they once had, then faced with comprehension that their thought processes now flow through a network of systems and programs, instead of flesh and blood.

  I’ve never been bothered much by that idea. I was born here. I don’t have any memories of thinking with flesh and blood. My body is being allowed to develop normally without the age slow-down of stasis. Dad developed a self-modifiable persona that alters my appearance in tandem with my body’s changes. I don’t understand at all, the technical aspects involved, but I will someday. There are very few real children because the process is so complicated. I want to fix that process because I don’t want any new children to grow up without kids their own age to play with, like I’ve had to do. There are the FringeChips, of course, but they’re just nujuvs. I think Dad hates that procedure more than anything else his colleagues practice. Nujuvers have their core persona altered (rejuvenated is the word the doctors use) to reflect a younger, even adolescent, personality. Perpetual youth, as long as you see your doctor often enough to control the side effects and reinforce the alterations.

  I had almost forgotten why I was here when the Net began narrowing into a long cone. From the cone’s pointed end, tiny figures blossomed and began to expand toward me rapidly. As the figures grew in size, the base of the cone around me contracted and then the cone burst silently, leaving me with the full expanse of the net around me again, and there was Ramone and his FringeChip buddies.

  Ramone had not made me wait that long before showing up. That was a positive sign. Ramone must be in a good mood. I hope so. The FringeChips settled into sight, solidly anchored in the drifting colors of the Net, eight or nine roughly human shapes hidden in individual persona masks, lounging in calculated postures of menace or indifference. All of them looked fierce and dangerous by design. The persona mask programming they were running deformed the appearance of their core personas with shifting clouds of hazy, Net-like color and fantastical images. Except for Ramone, I’d never seen any of the FringeChips in anything but their streaming personas. I felt naked.

  “Look who’s here,” one said. I stifled a sarcastic remark. I may be naïve, but I’m not suicidal.

  “Zartron is out of the way for now, guys. Thanks for inviting me,” I actually said. “He might be suspicious of the address, though.” I was proud of the steadiness of my voice. It’s always a good idea to remind the FringeChips about Zartron and the fact that he would show up instantly when summoned. I kept Ramone in sight, hoping for a sign that everything was okay.

  “Naw,” said Surge, one of the few shapes I recognized. “We listened in after he ID’ed us. No suspicions.” Surge twisted up one corner of his mouth in a sneer enhanced by the effects of the persona mask. “Even better, this part of the Net tape worms calling routines. You and Zartron are really out of touch, and since you ordered him to lay off until you called, he won’t suspect a thing for hours.” Surge shifted his stance, and for a moment I could see multiple six inch needles protruding through his fingertips. Then they disappeared, hidden again in the shifting shapes of his personal mask.

  “How can the Net abort calling routines?” I asked. I wasn’t sure if that was even possible. Surge could be lying. I almost hot keyed Zartron to pop in, and then thought better of it. If they were lying and Zartron showed up, my trip on the Net was over before it began and Ramone would never let me in with them again.

  “Who cares?” Ramone, (who used the name Norton when he was streaming), said. “Maybe a modem down or something. Anyway, now you can stream with us without worrying about your nurse popping up.”

  “Yeah, lucky for me,” I agreed dubiously. Was I really loose in the Net, totally free of Zartron? Giddy excitement drowned out the worry.

  “Well, you gonna wander around the Net with your face on or what?” All the FringeChips were now waiting on me. “Let’s get it going!”

  “Okay!” They were waiting for me to beg a copy of a persona mask off one of them. They ridiculed me the one time I went streaming with them because I didn’t have one of my own. Asking Dad was out of the question. He’d know what I wanted it for. Getting a persona mask the way the FringeChips always did was just a little too scary for me. There are other ways, though. I had a surprise for these guys.

  Before Dad was dismissed by the hospital, he’d been doing a series of lectures on various subjects, including persona mask design. The point of the persona mask lecture had been to discourage their development, so there was not much technical information, but it got me started.
For more technical data I had to search through previous SciBoard publications and lectures by my Dad. I’m sure Dad knows I’ve been accessing his lecture file, but even Zartron doesn’t know I’ve gotten access to Dad’s professional files on the SciBoard or what I’ve been doing with what I’ve learned. Dad can be very over-protective sometimes.

  Technically a persona is a computerized bio-electronic composite personality. They are uniquely coded for each individual and rarely need modification unless an error condition is detected. They are specifically designed to maintain consistency, which is why altering them (such as rejuvenation) can cause serious personality rifts as the program tries to reassert its original functions.

  A persona mask, however, is nothing more than a glorified Terminate and Stay Resident program. As a TSR, a persona mask is loaded into your systems and, when activated, reads output directly from core memory. The persona mask alters and adds to the incoming data in accordance with its programming and sends the results to the visuals subroutine for processing.

  The changes are only temporary and do not directly alter the persona. When the TSR is disabled, the user’s original systems are left unaffected. The altered visuals subroutine acts as an effective and often bizarre disguise. If that was all a PM did, Dad would probably not have objected so strenuously to them. Most persona masks, however, come packaged with additional subroutines to add substance to the flesh, such as maintenance tools modified into dueling implements, or even deadlier, illegal combat weapons.

  I wasn’t a master programmer yet, but I knew enough to rig my own persona mask. It was crude, but then I’m just a kid. The buffalo FringeChips should appreciate it, however. I loaded the small file and activated the persona mask.

  The reaction to my home-made persona mask was satisfactory, if short-lived.

  “Hey, Norton, the kid’s got a PM!”, one of them said superfluously.

  “Yeah, spaghetti coder,” Norton said mockingly. “Don’t you think I can see that?”

  “Looks kinda like you do, Norton,” observed another.

  “I got eyes.”

  It’s true, I designed the persona mask to resemble Ramone’s (a.k.a. Norton’s) persona mask. It was easier to work toward a certain look than invent one of my own. I found that out the hard way when all of my bright ideas kept bombing when I loaded the program. The similarity is only superficial, though. I was able to modify my appearance somewhat, but installing extensions or making more radical changes was something I haven’t yet mastered.

  Norton resembled a man-sized, upright frog. His primary color was a putrid blue-green that overlaid a silver sheen, hiding his more radical alterations. The visuals were not very original, but Norton’s persona mask had additional subroutines that made Surge’s needles look harmless. I couldn’t even replicate the silver sheen, much less any special subroutines, but I think I got the frog-look right.

  “He stole your PM, Norton,” protested Surge. I don’t know why Surge disliked me so much, but the feeling was mutual. I waited for Norton’s reaction.

  “Shut it down, Surge,” he said. Norton waved a frog arm at me, “Where’d you get that?” I still couldn’t tell if he was mad or flattered, so I decided to tell the truth. I didn’t want Norton thinking I might have capabilities similar to his. I might get wiped when I had my back turned.

  “I designed it myself.” That drew a lot of laughter from the group. Norton didn’t laugh, and they quieted, waiting for Norton to tell them what to do.

  “What’s it do?” Again, I thought about lying, but even if Norton let it go, eventually one of the gang would try me.

  “Just what you see, that’s all.”

  Norton thought about that. Then he grinned. “That’s the stupidest excuse for a PM I ever saw.” The others laughed uproariously. “Nobody but you could have designed it, frog face.”

  Norton turned to his gang. “He doesn’t look like me at all.”

  “Yeah,” several agreed at once.

  “Looks more like a tadpole to me,” added Surge.

  “What a joke,” chimed in someone else.

  I breathed easier. I was the brunt of their jokes again, but I knew the FringeChips had all stolen their persona masks or obtained illegal copies from the BlackBoard. Not one of them was capable of understanding how they were designed, much less program one themselves. They were impressed and were determined not to show it. I was in!

  “Maybe we should make his streaming name Tadpole,” suggested one of them. Norton nixed that.

  “No. He goes by what we already agreed.” I don’t think Norton wanted any more reminders about how much I resembled him. “Surge, do the honors.” Surge showed a blunt faced grim and extended the needles from his fingers with dramatic slowness. I tried not to back away when he placed his hands on either side of my face. The needles were the visual representation of the special coding of Surge’s persona mask. They undoubtedly could do serious damage to my systems, via intruder, virus, or parasite code. I didn’t want to know which.

  “By Norton decree, you shall be labeled ‘Recover’,” intoned Surge. They all laughed, and Surge abruptly removed his arms from around my head, making me flinch. I was unharmed.

  The name was an epithet from programming’s ancient history. It was a reminder that I was not totally accepted into the gang and took some of the elation out of my persona mask success. I wasn’t going to let that stop me from streaming though.

  Ramone was studying an LL chip. He was all business now, carefully setting the chip’s thirty-two dip switches, and his gang was quiet while he concentrated. The last time I was with Ramone his Locator/Loader routine held only sixteen dip switches. The new chip increased addressable range by a power of two, assuming you knew the address you wanted. I didn’t know a single address that required more than the usual sixteen bytes, but Ramone evidently did, because he was setting every switch.

  The double function chip had two studs. Ramone pressed the first stud and a red, smoky ring about six inches in diameter glowed into being to Ramone’s right—the Interrupt!

  “It’s Initiation time, Recover,” Ramone said. I was still staring at the Interrupt and didn’t realize he was talking to me until he repeated my streaming name more forcefully. “Recover!” I jerked my eyes away from the Interrupt and met Ramon’s, which stared back at me with reptilian chillness. He then told me what I was to do and gave me a small box.

  When Ramone pressed the second stud, I’d stream to the new location set by Ramone on the LL chip. Once there, I was going to steal a new program from a BlackBoard dealer’s private files. Ramone explained that the small box he’d just given me was a decrypter and would crack the dealer’s file safeguards. It was fast but not subtle, more like smashing a window and snatching up its contents than picking a lock. The decrypter would also set off alarms but, hopefully, disable any protective programming more dangerous than simple alarms.

  The LL chip was set for delayed automatic return to avoid any tracer programming. If I got hung up I’d be left behind.

  There wasn’t any time for second thoughts about what I was doing. Refusal wasn’t possible. I didn’t know how to abort the settings on the LL chip. If I refused to do the snatch, I’d be left behind to face the unknown dealer. A dealer in stolen software would not turn me over to the Gov, I was sure of that. I couldn’t imagine what would happen to me if I were caught, so I’d better not be caught, I told myself. Ramone pressed the second stud.

  I popped up inside a glittering sphere packed with bright dots of light that immediately began swarming over me like angry bees. In an instant the dots condensed together and I was covered in heavy silver chains made fast to the edges of the sphere. I could feel something prying at my persona mask, working to strip it away. If my persona mask had been a standard release, the prying program would probably have ripped it away before I was even aware of what was happening. But my custom mask, crude as it is, conf
used the demasker long enough for me to activate the decrypter. The sphere immediately began pulsing an angry red-orange-red, obviously sending the alarm. The bright dots sloughed off of me to fall inertly at my feet.

  The demasker was not giving up on prying loose the persona mask to see who I was, but the decrypter was hindering its progress. The decrypter was also supposed to contain any programming I could copy, but it had its hands full with the demasker.

  I tried tapping into the dealer’s directory, but I got no response. The auto return on the decrypter would signal the LL chip shortly, and I had nothing to take back with me. I had done everything Ramone had told me to do, but I knew he wouldn’t be satisfied if I came back empty-handed. There was one other thing I could do. Freeing up some of my own memory, I opened a channel and ran auto copy for anything I could get—random code, maybe something on the dot swarm or the demasker, anything.

  I felt the auto return trip on the decrypter and the demasker abruptly terminate, but the sphere remained stubbornly around me. Even as I watched, the sphere blackened and I was blind. If I hadn’t been able to feel the decrypter still repeating the return command, I would have thought I’d been left behind. Then auto copy picked something up and code flowed into memory.

  I didn’t know what I had, but as soon as the furious flow of incoming code stopped, the auto return began functioning and I found myself back in the Net with Ramone and the FringeChips.

  Ramone took the decrypter from me and checked its memory. “You got nothing,” he said dangerously, although there was relief in his voice as well. Why relief? I gave that only passing thought; it was the dangerous tone I was worried about.

  “I did!” I said quickly. “The decrypter was blocking a demasker and I couldn’t get it to open its memory…”

  “So you didn’t get nothing!” accused Surge loudly.

  “I loaded it into my own memory instead!” Ramone snapped his mouth shut on whatever he was about to say. He seemed to have trouble speaking.

  “Bull shit,” muttered Surge, but even he seemed subdued by my pronouncement.

  “I want you to copy into this decrypter everything you picked up,” Ramone said finally. “Then you are going to let me run a permanent wipe of the location where you stored it. Understand?”

  I had never seen Ramone like this. He suddenly seemed much older than a nujuver could be. He was also very desperate for whatever it was I had stolen from the dealer without even knowing what it was or how I picked it up.

  “Sure, Norton,” I said, remembering to call him by his streaming name, “but a memory wipe certainly isn’t necessary. I picked it up on auto copy, anyway, and it’s probably just garbage.” I wasn’t about to give Ramone access to my memory with a wipe program.

  “There is only one thing you could have picked up at that location, and believe me, a memory wipe is the least of what you’ll need if you don’t start making that copy RIGHT NOW!” Ramone’s voice rose into a shout.

  “No.” I said. Ramone looked surprised. I was pretty surprised myself and immediately terrified. I felt like looking over my shoulder to see who was speaking for me. I certainly hadn’t intended to defy Ramone. I was about to tell him that, but Ramone already had other ideas.

  “Surge, convince him.” Surge moved forward eagerly, the needles extending through his fingers displayed prominently for my benefit. I felt rational thought fleeing and panic gleefully taking over. I couldn’t seem to say the words that would get me off the hook. I wondered if I would die. I must be mad, I told myself, in the few moments before Surge would reach me and invade my systems. As if to confirm that statement, I loaded the mystery program I had stolen and ran it.

  I was horrified anew at myself. The program was already a pirated copy before I stole it. What nasty surprises did the original programmer include for users of pirated copies? What additional safeguards did the dealer append to it? What damage did I do by forcing the copy? I wish Zartron were here. He could at least check the disk for booby traps. He wasn’t, and the program was active.

  It was a TSR, and a persona mask; that much was obvious, and somewhat of a relief. The mystery persona mask deactivated my own home version, replacing it with a new appearance. Surge had paused at the change. I wanted to see myself, and suddenly, I could. Actually, it was better than seeing. I knew what I looked like in the persona mask without having to see it. I was a sleek, non-reflective black missile. Everything I was and could be was secreted in intimidating, suggestive black. Every sense was bloated with the power pulsing in slow waves from the program. I felt drunk and out of control and in command of the whole world all at the same time.

  “Take it away from him!” Ramone hissed. Surge moved in again.

  “No!” I sensed a question mark in my head, the persona mask requesting my affirmation on a course of action. Surge’s needled hands were reaching toward me. I was confused, but Surge’s needled hands convinced me. I agreed to the implicit request, whatever it was, knowing I couldn’t stand up against Surge, yet feeling a strange confidence in the abilities the new persona mask hinted it could use.

  There was no rush of power, no dramatic change, but Surge froze in shock when the dangerous needles abruptly melted away. The needles were followed by his hands. Surge started screaming. Surge’s persona mask dissolved obscenely while pieces of Surge broke apart and disintegrated. His wails dwindled to whimpers and then there was nothing left. It had taken only seconds.

  I could feel Ramone and the remaining FringeChips trying to fling me from the Net, but I wouldn’t let them do it. It was easy to stop them by using the awesome power I felt. I knew I could have wiped every one of them.

  “No.” Ramone and the rest of the FringeChips recoiled, ending their struggle to toss me out of the Net, but the single word had not been for them. I realized I had been thinking about wiping all of them. I’d actually been on the verge of doing just that. Why? The persona mask was the reason, of course. I had expected a nasty surprise and I got one, all right, but the joke was on the FringeChips too. Surge’s screams were still ringing in my head. Nausea rose, and I couldn’t bear to have this thing loaded any more. Out! I shouted at the persona mask, and disabled the thing…

  Dad’s lobby. Dad’s secretary is rising from behind her artfully nicked desk.

  “Hi, Andy. Your Dad is working, Hun, and can’t be interrupted right now. Do you wish to leave him a message?”

  “Huh?” I was disoriented. Something…what?

  “Andy?” Sara was concerned. “Are you all right, Hun?”

  I managed to look at her. “Uh, sure. Sure!”

  “You’ve been standing there almost a minute with your mouth open. Are you sure there’s nothing wrong?” Sara’s lips were pursed and her eyes were too bright. I thought I could see tiny pointed teeth peeking vampire-like from the edges of her mouth.

  “Wow! Yea!” I backed away. “I’m fine. Honest.”

  “Maybe I should go ahead and interrupt your Dad, okay?”

  “No, that’s okay. I’ll see him later.” I don’t know if she heard that last, because I was popping up my bedroom even as I said it.

  My bedroom had barely settled around me when it broke up and was replaced by Dad’s office. Dad was half turned away from me, making adjustments to an instrument on his desk. When he turned to face me, I could see that the instrument was a debugger probe.

  “Sara keyed me that you left the office in a big hurry and that you looked very ill,” he said without even a hello. “Did something happen?” Dad was staring at me in that analytical way he reserved for particularly difficult clients, teeth chewing absently at the inside of his mouth. He’s just worried about you, I tried to tell myself, but I couldn’t seem to concentrate on that.

  The debugger held a terrible fascination for me. Half of my mind was relieved to see my Dad’s competent hands on the diagnostics tool, but a larger part of me remained aloof, cal
culating, and distrustful. There were huge holes in my memory that I could no longer access, which I noted, but could not become alarmed about as I should have.

  “Your system monitors are way off the scale, Andy,” Dad was saying, the concern finally finding its way into his voice. That reached me, and I began to shake with fear.

  “There is nothing to be afraid of,” he said, trying to be soothing, but he was scared, too, I could tell, and our fear fed on each other, growing. “I’m going to run a probe, just check a few things out, okay? We’ve done this dozens of times.” I couldn’t do any more than stare glassily at him, terror strangling my words before I could say them. “Andy, what the hell has happened?” I wish I knew, but that memory was out of my reach. My inability to respond must have convinced Dad because he activated the probe.

  A curious questioning sensation that was eerily familiar oozed through my mind, dominating, demanding a decision. Options floated up for my consideration, but I could neither understand them nor understand where they came from.

  REFUSE THE PROBE. ADVANTAGE – SIMPLE AND QUICK. DISADVANTAGES – WILL RAISE STRONG SUSPICIONS AND ALERT PROBE IT DEALS WITH MORE THAN SICK CHILD.

  DECEIVE THE PROBE. DISADVANTAGE – INSUFFICIENT TIME TO OVERLAY ALL EVIDENCE. RISKY.

  USE EVIDENCE OF THE INFILTRATION TO LEAD THE PROBE. ADVANTAGE – PROBE UNLIKELY TO SUSPECT TRAP. PROBE MANIPULATOR COULD BE COMPROMISED AND WIPED.

  The office environment broke up and I lost external stimuli. I was loose in my own head, drifting helplessly and out of reach of Dad, but I was thinking more clearly. The questioning sensation was growing, demanding a decision and threatening to bury everything else but those horrifying options that did not belong to me, only now I could separate what I was thinking from whatever else was going on in my mind. There was something in my system with me. It was keeping me away from memory locations that would tell me what it was. Maybe it was a virus or something; an intruder infiltrating my system. I wanted to scream. I felt violated. “Get out of me!”

  I CAN NOT RESPOND TO THAT INPUT. The words were huge in my head. DECISION TIMEFRAME INFRACTION. ENGAGE AUTO JUDGEMENT ROUTINE PRIME. ALLOW PROBE INCURSION AND SEEK WIPE OF PROBE MANIPULATOR UPON CONTACT. CONTINUE INFILTRATION OF HOST.

  “What? Is that you, Dad?” The booming voice in my head definitely was not me this time. I was becoming less and less in command of my own mind. First I was sense deprived, and now the intruder was systematically locking out my access to the rest of me. “Dad, help me!”

  Dad would do everything he could. I knew that. The thought helped stem the panic. Dad would be talking to me now if he could. What can I do to help him? I had to assume Dad had loaded the debugger probe and begun a trace. I doubt I could get past the intruder to contact him directly through the probe. Think! Maybe there is another way.