On U.S. soil, he pulled the bus over at a temporary roadhouse and set the handbrake. He eased off the driver’s perch, chafing his narrow ass to get the blood flowing, and gave forth a drawn-out “gaaaah” as pins and needles stabbed his sweat-marinated muscles. He heard the multinational rousing itself behind him. First, the major investors in the front row. Then the rest of the board of directors in the row behind them. Then four rows of middle managers and finally the great mass of frontline workers, techs, customer service reps, troubleshooters, antennamen, switchwomen, chicken pluckers and left-handed bottle stretchers.

Lee-Daniel flipped the windows to transparent and let the sun shine in, provoking groans from the corporation. MacDiarmid, the angel investor who’d been in since the multinational had been able to fit in a sedan, threw a strong arm around Lee-Daniel’s shoulders. “You OK?” he said. The tone had phony solicitousness. MacDiarmid had been a stand-up guy through half a dozen disasters, from hostile takeover attempts to roadblocks to high-speed engine failure, and Lee-Daniel knew a fake when he heard it.

“I’m fixing to lay down and die,” Lee-Daniel said, stretching theatrically, his pipe-cleaner arms straining.

“I’m street-legal in New York,” Mac said. “How about I drive the bus for the next couple shifts?” His black hair was showing grey now, but his eyebrows were still fierce and black, his eyes still sharp in their nest of whiskey-cured crow’s-feet.

“No!” Lee-Daniel said. He never ceded the wheel — it was his damned company and he’d drive the damned bus. Lee-Daniel saw the shareholder confidence eroding before his eyes.

“Just for a while, OK? Not permanent, just for a day or two, just long enough for you to get over the sleep deficit and regrow some stomach lining.”

It was hard being the CEO of a mobile multinational. The shareholder oversight was murder. “Come on, Mac,” he said. “I can drive the bus. One thing I can always do, I can drive the fucking bus.”

MacDiarmid looked closely at him, then smiled and gave him a burly man-hug that smelled of sandalwood soap and good liquor. “Yeah, of course, of course.”

“Thanks, Mac,” Lee-Daniel said. “How about we get some eats?” He put his hand on the geometry reader beside the wheel, re-authenticated to the bus, then hit the hatches. Doors hissed open at the back, at the front, at the middle, fresh dusty air rushing in all at once in an ear-popping whoosh. The bus knelt ponderously and the company piled out.

MacDiarmid hustled away to join the rest of the investors, his exquisite handmade leather shoes slapping the paving, the cuffs of his wool tailor-made slacks shushing over their gleaming uppers, and as Lee-Daniel locked the bus down and armed it up, he watched the angel investor whisper in his co-shareholders’ ears. Lee-Daniel couldn’t hear the words, but six years at the wheel of Cognitive Radio Inc. had schooled him well in the body language of investors and he knew his days with CogRad were numbered.

The roadhouse was the kind of TAZ that got less entertaining by the second. Lee-Daniel stood in the blinking vegaslights for an eternity while he authenticated to the roadhouse-area-network, surrounded by generic ads while the giant vending machine figured out who he was and what to sell him. Once the wall spat out his token — poker chips adorned with grinning, dancing anthropomorphic dollar, euro and yen symbols — the walls around him leapt to delighted life, pitching their wares hard. He struggled with the rest of the corporation to make out the actual nature of the products behind the pitch and locate a tuna-melt and wave his chip at it.

The sandwich appeared in a slot by his feet and when he bent to fetch it, he was bombarded with upsell ads set into the floor tiles: “Lee-Daniel! People who bought tuna-melts also bought thousand-hour power cells. People who bought OralCare mouth kits also bought MyGuts brand edible oscopycams. People who bought banana-melatonin rice-shakes also bought tailormade sailcloth shirts by Figaro’s of London and Rangoon.”

It only got worse then, as he sat down at a crowded table with middle managers in need of reassurance, while swatting away the buzzing aerostats that probabalistically routed towards those diners with the highest credit ratings, delivering pitches whose tone and content had been honed by genetic algorithms that sharpened them to maximal intrusiveness and intriguingness. It took vicious, darwinian computation to make a high colonic sound like an afternoon at a spa.

“No one else will say it,” said Joey Riel, a 17-year-old Metis whose fluency in English, French and Ojibwa had made him the youngest middle manager in CogRad history, eight months before. “So I will. That was fucked up. Too fucked up.”

His griping had been constant since his promotion up from antennaman and getting caught between the Mohawk Warriors’ plan to seize the radio spectrum on their territory and the trigger-happy Provincial cops had only intensified it.

Further down the arcade, the investors were waving their tokens over a trading table, playing the instant futures market. An aerostat overhead mirrored the gameplay, and as Lee-Daniel watched, MacDiarmid doubled his money on a short-odds bet on two cherries and a lemon, then Earnshaw lost big when his long-odds investment on uranium and coal came back with two windmills and a photovoltaic array.

“Amen to that, bro,” said Elaine, who ran the surveyors. She was all lean muscle and blackfly repellent and mail-order outdoorwear, handily capable of living off the land for weeks while trekking the bush, homing in on optimal repeater locations. At the Akwesahsne Sovereign, she’d broken the hearts of a half dozen starry-eyed Mohawk Warriors who’d puppydogged after her as she shlepped the length and breadth of their territory, warchalking neon arrows to indicate RF shadows cast by especially leafy trees and outcroppings of granite Canadian Shield. That was before the Sûreté du Québec arrived on the scene and it all went pear shaped.

“It won’t happen again,” said Mortimer, the security man. Lee-Daniel had been protecting the old dodderer from the board of directors, who saw him as an insurance nightmare. Mortimer’s hands shook, he was nightblind, and he was 98 years old, and there wasn’t enough rejuve in the world to give him the mental flexibility required by the modern age. Lee-Daniel had stripped him of his sidearms, even the nonlethals, at the same time as he’d promoted Joey Riel. Now Mortimer carried a loudhailer through which he could bark orders in his old cop voice, the voice that made your asshole clench up and your shoulders itch for a soon-come bullet.

The investors howled again, and the aerostat told them all that MacDiarmid had cleaned up bigtime, paying out 100-to-1 on an investment in Shell Oil collectibles — two derricks and a shell. The Series A/Series B investors crowded around him, giving him awe-struck backslaps. The other two might be the fronts for gigafunds, but that was all they were: fronts. They were the Voice of the Money while the company was on the road, junior associates who needed to make a good score on their wanderjahr if they wanted to make partner. Mac was solo money, a shrewd individual investor who’d acquired his 15-share in CogRad with no more investment than a year’s worth of gas and roadhouse meals while Lee-Daniel was getting the show on the road.

“The Mohawk Warriors are right: The rich get richer and the poor get children,” Joey Riel said, shaking his young head at the investors and the board carrying MacDiarmid off to a private dining room for their dinner and nightly board meeting.

“Those Mohawks got you all full of bolshy horseshit, didn’t they?” Mortimer said. The Mohawk Warrior Society talked a good anarcho-syndicalist line.

As far as most of CogRad’s customers were concerned, tax-free packets were the new tax-free cigarettes. The Mohawk Warriors on the Québec/New York border were in it for the samizdata. They had big plans for their cognitive radio network. They’d peered with two upstate New York networks and an Algerian satellite backbone, and they were reselling enciphered proxy time on their network to anyone who wanted it, providing an anonymizing relay for any and all data, regardless of origin, destination or payload.

Lee-Daniel knew he should have gotten them to pay upfront. Nothing got the blackshirts interested in private wireless networking like routing suspicious real-time chatter between Burmese guerrilla cells and suspected movie swappers in DC. But that wasn’t how CogRadio had been built. The native bands that were desperate enough to assert that their ancestral treaties didn’t encompass the RF spectrum couldn’t afford to lay out cash for CogRadio’s hardware, training and remote administration. CogRadio was as much a bank as a technology start-up.

The Canadian government took a hard line on anything that looked like separatism. Two CogRadio employees who’d been unlucky enough to get stuck on the wrong side of the barricades would rot in a Canadian pen for 10-to-15, eight with good behavior. Keeping the corporation’s respect after that clusterfuck was killing Lee-Daniel.

With the investors off out of sight, the managers and the frontliners shucked their veneer of civility and began to get wild, invalidating their health insurance with carbo treats. Elaine sucked down three tequila cartons and glared bleary hostility at him.

“If you had any fucking guts,” she said, mangling a carton with her strong, scarred hands. “If you had any fucking balls, we would have gotten everyone out. They were my people and you wouldn’t stand up to those shitheels,” she jerked her head at the investors’ private room, “to save them. All you care about is the goddamned money.” The smell of old sweat and booze made his eyes water.

It’s a business, Lee-Daniel said inside his head, biting his tongue. Where do you think your goddamned paycheck comes from?

Mortimer hitched himself erect, creaking up from his seat. “That’s enough of that,” he said in his cop voice, laying a still-strong hand on Elaine’s shoulder. “If you don’t like your job, you can give notice, but you’ll keep it polite as long as you’re working here.”

Elaine tried to shake his hand off, but he kept his grasp firm. Lee-Daniel had been through one or two of these in the first year, and he knew that Mortimer knew what he was doing. Things could get awfully heated up at times like this.

“You’re hurting me,” Elaine said. “Let go.”

“Apologize to the man,” Mortimer said, the voice of authority. “You’re out of line.”

Joey Riel leapt on Mortimer’s back, his arms locked around Mortimer’s neck. “Don’t you touch her, you pig,” he hissed. Mortimer took hold of Joey’s thumb and twisted it into a come-along and Joey let go, dancing around and clutching his hand.

“You broke my fucking thumb!” he said, and then Elaine was on her feet, shouting incoherently, right up in Mortimer’s face, darting her head at him like a striking cobra. The frontliners broke off their gaming and boozing and necking and rushed over, hooting for blood.

Lee-Daniel felt the old adrenaline, the “leadership” brain-reward that he got when it all came down to a crisis. He jumped up on their table, scattering their dinners’ active packaging, which curled and waved as it flapped to the floor, cycling through its upsell ads.

“Enough!” he roared. It wasn’t a cop voice, but it was a voice nevertheless — the voice of the man who signs the paycheck, the disappointed father who was going to turn the bus around and take the company home this instant if he didn’t get respect. Lee-Daniel didn’t have to use that voice often, but its rarity was part of its effectiveness.

It didn’t work. Elaine still shouted, Joey Riel was digging through the drifts of trash for a weapon, and the frontliners were still cheering their bosses on. “Enough!” he said again, just to check, but it didn’t work any better the second time around.

He got down off the table and circled Mortimer, who had the mic for his loudhailer clipped to his belt. Lee-Daniel snatched it up and hit the Talk button, dialing the volume up to max with his thumb.

“Enough!” he said, and the loudhailer amplified his voice to staggering volume. At max, it was meant to be used to signal passing aircraft. Inside the vending machine’s claustrophobic bowels, it was like a bullet ricocheting through their skulls. Some of the more delicate antennamen dropped to their knees, their hands clutched to their heads, and Mortimer staggered back into Lee-Daniel, nearly knocking him off his feet.

Lee-Daniel cut the volume in half and hit Talk again. The company shied back when the speaker array on Mortimer’s bandolier popped to life. “All right, enough. Company meeting. Get chairs, sit on the floor, whatever. Right here, right now.” He handed the mic back to Mortimer, who wiped it down with care and clipped it back to his belt.

He gave Mortimer his poker chip. “Get a bag of ice for Joey,” he said. “And thanks, man.”

Mortimer gave him the cop stare and trudged off to one of the vending banks and started prodding methodically at its display.

“All right,” Lee-Daniel said, again, looking into the expectant, upturned faces of his company. “All right.

“No one is happy about Akwesahsne, all right? I take responsibility. We’re wireless hackers, not guerrillas. We’re not going to get into that kind of situation again.” Joey Riel turned around and stalked to the back of the roadhouse. “Nothing is worth endangering the safety of the employees of this company.” Lee-Daniel thought of his investors and their relentless push for more.

“That said, If you want your options to be worth something, someday, this company’s going to have to grow. We’ve been growing at 20 percent per quarter for the past three years, and that’s right on track. Maintaining that growth is going to necessitate excursions out of the USA. We’ll be going back to Canada — better prepared, wiser, more cautious — but we’ll be going back. The Caribbean, too. South America and Mexico. I shouldn’t have to tell you that radio has no borders. Wherever there’s unencumbered spectrum, we’ll be there. There’s never going to be a ‘routine’ job, whatever that means. Every job will be different. If you’re looking for a ‘routine’ job, you’re in the wrong business.

“We’re headed for the Seneca Sovereign in Cattaraugus next. There’ll be a week of R&R there: fishing, hunting, gaming. They have a decent theater there that’s doing a Beckett revival, and I’ve got half-price tickets if you want ‘em.

“Half-price tickets for those who stay, that is. Because I want to make one thing clear: If you don’t like the way I run this company, you shouldn’t put up with it. Give me your notice, I’ll cut you a check and you can get lost. That’s your remedy. That’s your only remedy. I’ll be sitting right here, any of you want to give your notice tonight.”

He sat down at a table and helped himself to someone’s carton of crantini, gave it a shake to cool it down, then took a nonchalant sip.

The silence was broken by the door to the investors’ dining room hissing open. The Series A investor stepped out into the chaos of the main concourse and crooked a finger at Lee-Daniel.

“We’d like to speak with you, if we may,” he said.

Akwesahsne was supposed to be a cakewalk. The Canadian Radio and Television Commission — Canada’s RF feds — were softies, more worried about ensuring that 30 percent of the entertainment product on the airwaves was “Canadian Content” than with monitoring ultra-low-power, ultra-wide-band cognitive radio experiments in rural Québec. The Mohawk Warrior Society, whose reservation was a Siamese twin with another rez in upstate New York, were accustomed to the American way of doing biz, had even underwritten MBAs for a bunch of the bros, which explained the animated growth charts back-linked to hundreds of diverse spreadsheets maintained by research committees across the continental Mohawk Nation infrastructure.

The Mohawk Warriors had raised consciousness. The road signs pointing the way to the rez were augmented with handpainted signage reading “Indian land,” and “Sovereign territory.”

The CogRadio magic bus pulled up to the guard in the pillbox at the Akwesahsne main gate, abuzz with new-gig energy, the anticipation of thirty skilled professionals who’d been crammed into a bus for four solid days, ready to tear each other’s throats out. The gatewoman was all of 17, not that you could tell at first, so crufted up was she with obsolete martian armor/arms and sensory array.

But once she came onto the bus for her customs inspection and removed her immersive headgear, it was obvious that she was no older than the switch girls who drifted in and out of the CogRad bus, using it as a means of making a little e-gold between footloose adventures in the Great American Heartland.

A 17-year-old with a defensive array of fast-acting anti-serotonin misters was a lot less threatening than a 30-year-old would have been, and orders of magnitude less terrifying than a similarly armed innovation-sick 50-year-old would have been. Joey Riel came forward, stinking of something between sweat socks and Doritos, and greeted her in familiar, colloquial French, something flirty by the sound of it, and she gave him a wry, patronizing smile.

“Why do you speak French, Brother? Why not greet me in Kanien’kéha, or Cree, or even Ojibwa? When we speak whiteman words, they make us think whiteman thoughts.” She turned to the bus and gave them a long stare. “Hello, whitemen,” she continued, “hello, whitewomen. Welcome to the Mohawk Warrior Society autonomous zone. No weapons. No sex with First People. No drinks or drugs. No whiteman tobacco.”

“Cook your own meals, wash your own plates, step lightly on the land. You can observe our nightly meetings if you are respectful, but it’s more important that you come to the seminars afterwards. There are lectures, role-playing exercises, personal storytelling, theater of the oppressed, newsblogging, warblogging, linkblogging, puppetmaking, outreach, filterbusting. Whiteman guests are welcome here, provided that they’re willing to help the cause.”

Lee-Daniel had heard variations on this speech before, but they usually came from hotheads who argued against renewing CogRad’s maintenance contract, not the official greeter before they’d even started the gig. He knew well enough to take it in stride and move on, but Joey Riel was blushing furiously at having been shot down for insufficient indianity by this highly macha hottie, and so he waved some verbal dick, asking something in Ojibwa, all testicular.

She fixed him with a withering stare. “You’re not the first apple I’ve met,” she said. Apple — red on the outside, white on the inside. “And you’re not the most pathetic. But you’re an apple and you’ve forgotten who you are, and that means that you don’t mean anything to me except a sad story and a warning to other First People.”

Joey Riel’s hands balled up into fists and the investors shifted nervously. Lee-Daniel got to his feet and interposed himself between them.

“Ya-tay-hay, madam,” he said. “Thank you for your welcome. Can you tell me where I should park the bus? We’ve got a lot of work to do today, while there’s still light to work by.”

- – - – - – - – - – - -

“You need to understand, it’s not personal,” MacDiarmid said, for the third time.

Lee-Daniel set down his ridiculous second-hand crantini carton and climbed slowly to his feet. “You need to understand, Mac, that I don’t care if it’s personal. Whether you’re forcing me out of this company, this company that I built with my own two hands, this company that is hitting every goddamned milestone, this company that is returning good dividends on your preferred stock, whether you’re forcing me out because you’re not my friend anymore –” he said this in a pinched, Mickey Mouse voice “– or whether you’re forcing me out because you think that it’s ‘for the best’ doesn’t matter to me at all. I don’t care if you’re doing it because you’re protecting your investment or because your astrologer told you to, I still won’t stand for it.”

The Series A and Series B investors, who’d started off looking uncomfortable, visibly squirmed during this. They weren’t accustomed to interpersonal conflict in the course of conducting their affairs. But Mac took it all in stride. Angels have to be prepared to slug it out to protect their investment.

“You don’t get to stand for it, LD,” MacDiarmid said, sipping at a frosty can of slushy ginseng-infused Long Island iced tea. “You don’t get a say in it. When the investors are united, you don’t have the equity to overrule us. The severance package is generous, the noncompete is lightweight, and you get to go with your dignity intact.” He didn’t need to add that fighting the board would mean a significant change to that picture. Fuck them and their noncompetition agreement, though — Lee-Daniel knew that enforcing a U.S./Canada noncompete would be tricky on Sovereign Indian territory.

“What’d they promise you, Mac?” Lee-Daniel asked. He’d shrewdly chosen his investors for their mutual animosity, believing that bitter enemies like the Series A gigafund and the Series B terafund would never come together, and that Mac, who’d been screwed on deals by principals from both funds, would never toss his lot in with them. “What do they have that’s worth your throwing away this entire investment?”

“No one’s throwing away anything. There comes a point in any business’s life cycle where the founders get out of their depth and we need to transition in a professional CEO. You’ve done a good job with CogRad, LD, and we recognize that, but if we’re going to ensure steady growth, we need seasoned leadership.”

“Seasoned?” He barked a laugh. “Mac, I invented this business! We’re five years ahead of our closest competitors — who only got that far by copying stuff I invented. Who the hell could possibly be more ‘seasoned’ than me?”

“You’ve never run a Fortune Five company,” the Series A man said. “You’ve never had more than fifty people working under you. Executive search firms –”

MacDiarmid waved at hand crusted with three class rings at the gesticulating Series A punk, who barely looked old enough to smoke. He’d only been out of B-school for a year and he’d only been on the bus for a month, but here he was, telling Lee-Daniel that they’d blown corporate funds, money he’d earned, on a slick-ass headhunter who’d spent it getting old frat brothers laid at fancy hotels on Hawai’i while negotiating how much of Lee-Daniel’s company they would end up with once they stole his job from him.

The punk shut up.

“Mac,” Lee-Daniel said, sitting down again, pulling up a chair. “Come here, Mac, take a seat, talk to me. I want to hear this from you, from the beginning.”

Mac stood, exchanging significant looks with the Series A and Series B investors.

“Come on, Mac, screw that. You and me, end-to-end.” That was CogRad jargon from back in the old days. The Internet was end-to-end, which meant that any two points could communicate without an intermediary interfering in the bitstream. In CogRad, you didn’t talk person-to-person or man-to-man, you talked end-to-end, just like the connectivity they brought to the rez. “I own 15 percent of this company, same as you — you owe me a decent explanation.”

MacDiarmid stood fast.

“Get in the fucking chair, Mac,” Lee-Daniel said, hating the whine in his voice. “If you want me to go along with this, get in the fucking chair.

“Mac, I’m sorry. Sorry if I flew off the handle. I’m a grown-up, you’re a grown-up, and we both care about CogRad. Get in the chair and tell me about this. Please.”

MacDiarmid sat.

“Listen up, LD. This is a great business, and a great company. Be proud, because you started something fantastic that will grow and grow.

“But I am saving your life. You’re burned out. You’re making bad decisions that threaten the lives of your people. You can’t even let someone else take the wheel when you’re nodding off. You can’t keep this up forever. Rate you’re going, you can’t keep this up for another six weeks. If I thought for a second that you’d take orders from someone else, I’d offer to keep you on as COO or VP of Research and Development. There’s no way, though — you’re like Napoleon on campaign.

“You’re great at the dirty work. You can get a crew onto a rez, get the terminals sited and installed and burned in. You can boss a bunch of egomaniacs and social retards on long road trips. That does not scale, LD. There aren’t enough Lee-Danielses to boss all the buses we’re going to field. A real CEO doesn’t make every single decision there is to make.

“You want it straight. You want it end-to-end. It’s come down to your ego versus our return on investment, and your ego loses. We’re settling into the next phase, going abroad, and that requires a professional touch. If Canada ends up in a firefight, what’ll it be like in Guatemala?”

The Series A man snorted a nasty chuckle and Lee-Daniel gripped the arms of his chair as hard as he could to keep from slugging the punk.

Lee-Daniel and his people work around a lot of surveying constraints. At the Moapa River Indian Reservation, the burial ground was freaking perfect for a repeater-array, with a commanding view of the entire goddamned rez. The Paiute elders loved the idea of getting out of the cutthroat slots biz, loved the idea of leveraging their airwaves into a telco that could handle the secure comms for every one of the casinos that they used to compete with.

The money couldn’t come at the expense of the burial ground. No CogRad surveyor crew was going to head up there and start hammering in stakes for the repeaters.

The Akwesahsne Warriors took the cake. A fat, middle-aged man in camou fatigues decorated with pow-wow badges who called himself “Meatloaf” briefed them with a topo map of the rez in the school auditorium, and they sat around it in the fading light of the sun that streamed through the steel-reinforced windows.

“The areas that have Post-its are strategic. No one except a Warrior goes within 20 meters of these.”

“Sixty feet,” Lee-Daniel translated for the surveyors and the antennamen, who were products of the American educational system and hence impedance-mismatched with the entire metric-speaking world.

“Sixty feet,” Meatloaf said. “You’ll know you’ve gotten too close if you find yourself at the bottom of a ten-foot pit with two broken legs. Don’t go near the strategic areas, OK?”

Elaine stood up and began to pace the map’s length. She unsnapped a laserpointer from her gearpig bandolier and began to hit each strategic area in turn.

“All the high ground, right?”

Meatloaf nodded.

“The perimeter, too, right?”

He nodded again.

Elaine gave Lee-Daniel a look, then ran the dot of her pointer over each of the strategic areas again. Some of the surveyors groaned and whispered to the antennamen and the switchgirls.

Lee-Daniel cleared his throat. “Meatloaf,” he said, “all respect, but well, this won’t work. Our radios operate on line of sight. If we can see it, we can shoot it at half a gigabit a second — slower if there are a lot of leaves and stuff in the way. If we can’t see it, we can’t shoot it. Zero bits per second. We need high ground, we need perimeter, otherwise we’re just wasting your time.”

Meatloaf shook his head. “Radio radiates. I can’t see the cell tower, but I can still reach it with my phone.”

“That’s dumb radio,” Lee-Daniel said. “If we want to have a conversation and we’re out of sight of one another, we can communicate, but only if we shout. That’s fine for us, but it’s not so good for the people between us, right, Mortimer?”

Mortimer, who’d been through one or two (hundred) of these demos before, took his cue from outside the doorway, hitting it with the loudhailer dialed up about half way. “Right,” he said.

“That’s how dumb radio works. You had a bunch of bands that you could communicate in — cellular, TV, AM, FM, cops, air traffic, whatever — and rules and licenses for each, governing how loud everyone gets to shout.” Taking their cues, the CogRads started to gabble all at once, in stripes through the ranked chairs, saying “AM AM AM” or “TV TV TV” or “cellular cellular cellular.”

“Smart radio — cognitive radio — is much more clever. Instead of shouting loud enough to be heard across the entire distance, cognitive radios cooperate with one another. When I need to talk to Mortimer, I first check around to see what channels are least occupied and most close to me, then I send my message to the best candidate.” He turned to Elaine, who’d come to stand by his shoulder. “Tell Mortimer that it’s time to come back,” he said.

Elaine turned to a switchgirl who’d positioned herself a few feet away and said, “Tell Mortimer it’s time to come back,” she said.

The switchgirl turned, but the next person in the chain, a customer service rep, had his phone headset in and was having a hushed support call — it was faked, just part of the script, but he gave a good impression of helping someone tech a network problem at a distance, tracking a nonexistent support script across his HUD and prodding at the air with a dataglove.

“Aha,” Lee-Daniel said, “here’s where it gets tricky. What if one of the radios between us is too busy to relay a message? We’ve got two options. We can wait — which we’ll do if we have to, but it adds latency to the message — or we can find an alternate path.”

The switchgirl — a network engineer he’d hired himself from a backwater DeVry at a job fair in Tulsa, who ran a little to fat but was still broad-shouldered from her time on the rowing machine she shlepped compulsively from gig to gig, facts that Lee-Daniel could recall with ease even if he couldn’t remember her name — turned back and passed the word onto a surveyor who was standing a little ways out of the way, who relayed it to Joey Riel, who was by the doorway, who stuck his head into the corridor.

Mortimer sauntered back into the auditorium. He put the mic to his lips and boomed “You want something, boss?”

Lee-Daniel clamped his hands to his ears along with the rest of the crew. “No need to shout,” he said to Mortimer. “Is there?” he said to Meatloaf.

“So, what’s the critical path, Mac?” Lee-Daniel asked. “Who’s going to run this circus between tonight and your executive search coming through with an empty suit to sit in the driver’s seat?”

“We thought you’d stay on, LD, help with a smooth transition.”

“Why would I do that?” Lee-Daniel said.

The Series A and Series B investors watched them like a tennis match, silent, eyes shining.

“Why don’t you two get us a couple beers, OK?” Mac said to them. They mooched off petulantly.

“LD, this is a company, not a calling. I want you to stay on — even if they don’t — for a couple weeks because that’s the best thing for the company. If you train your successor, it’ll get us onto the curve and we’ll make more money. You’ll make more money. We’re not dismantling this company, we’re making it bigger and better and more important. A thousand buses, a thousand crews, unwiring as fast as they can go. Lobbyists working for spectrum reform. People with good haircuts and suits who don’t talk about ‘liberation.’”

Mac was telling the truth now, not that it helped. Lee-Daniel had built himself the ultimate geek job, doing work that mattered and not rotting in a cubicle prison. Staying on would be the best thing for the company, but it was the company now, not his company. Not anymore.

“What’s in it for me, Mac?”

Mac leaned in close and whispered fiercely. “You’re the wrong man for this job. Whatever you end up doing, it’s going to be easier if you have some cash in your pocket. They don’t want you to stay, but I put myself on the line, because it’s in the company’s best interest. I didn’t do it because you’re my buddy. You might not be my buddy anymore. I don’t like that, but that’s business. We can make this company really big — you’ll be able to retire on your share in 18 months if we go according to plan. We’ll raise 10 billion on IPO if we raise a cent, you just watch. I’ve been through this, LD, and I know what a success smells like. This will be a success — your success — if you play along. If you don’t, well, we could all end up in the shitter. Canada was the last straw for them. We either go on without you or we don’t go on at all, do you understand?”

The Series A and Series B men returned with a couple of novelty beers in aerosol cans. Mac and Lee-Daniel sprayed their throats with the brew and swallowed, making faces. This was high style in the circles the Series A and Series B men traveled.

“I see,” Lee-Daniel said. “So I either walk out of here as interim CEO, knowing that I’m gone in a couple weeks, or I walk out of here fired. Is that the deal?”

“That’s the deal,” the Series A man said. “And I don’t see anyone offering anything better.”

MacDiarmid gave him a shut-up-asshole look, then spread his hands out.

“When I raised money from you, we did it over the course of several weeks. We talked to lawyers. They exchanged documents. I don’t think it’s reasonable for you to expect me to sign anything now without at least consulting a lawyer.”

“You want several weeks?” the Series A man said, with mock incredulity.

“Half an hour,” Lee-Daniel said. “I don’t think that’s too much to ask.”

- – - – - – - – - – - -

Akwesahsne was just the sort of woods that the CogRad gear thrived in. Within a week, the entire rez would be unwired at 500 megabits/second, enough connectivity to move whatever data they could find a use for. The Warriors were resentful at first, but they came around.

Lee-Daniel went out with a crew that Elaine was leading, up on the northern border of the Sovereign. She had two junior surveyors with her, all of them loaded with positioning gear that tied in to Galileo, the European GPS network — the Galileo gear cost a fortune, but they’d found that their American GPS kit often mysteriously stopped working when they were working on projects in the territorial USA. They’d ordered the Euro stuff from a bunch of anti-globalization activists who’d found that the same thing happened in any city hosting an economic summit. Europeans were more likely to treat infrastructure as sacrosanct, while the U.S. was only too happy to monkey with GPS for tactical reasons. The Series A man hated the expense of the Galileo gear, hated paying off crusty-punk Starbucks-smashers for critical tools, hated the optics of looking like a bunch of anarchists instead of a spunky start-up.

The surveyors and the Warriors kept their distance as they set out, one Warrior leading and one bringing up the rear. Elaine called for a break every five or ten minutes to check her location against the map and to hammer down an RF beacon that would serve to measure the drop-off over the terrain as they hiked. She used binox with an integrated laserpointer to check the distance and clarity to remote points, and a squealing handheld brick of oscilloscope gear to measure the crossover of the other beacons on the hill. All the while, she muttered down her cellphone’s headpiece with the other crews, making sure they weren’t overlapping or diverging too widely, keeping everything squared with the maps on her screens and in her head.

The woods had a high canopy, which was good news. When they started out, they’d focused on getting above the leaf line, since leaves badly scattered RF signals, but they’d ended up with networks that were only reachable by people who were twenty feet off the ground. They’d blown a fortune downlinking the relays to ground-level stations with omnidirectional antennae.

But then Lee-Daniel had had a brainstorm — build the network below the leaf line. Heavy canopy starved out any foliage that grew below the treetops, leaving a clear line of sight (modulo the tree trunks, which were largely RF transparent) on the forest floor. That pushed CogRad from a theoretical project to a real success.

The frontmost Warrior, a girl of about 16, started off treating Elaine’s halts as a nuisance, but after the fifth one, when Elaine unshipped a high-sensitivity digital altimeter, the girl’s curiosity overcame her, and she crowded in close to watch Elaine work. She didn’t say anything, but thereafter it was clear that she was fascinated by Elaine and her masterful use of all her toys, bangles and bobs. As Elaine stalked through the brush with her face stuck in the output from her various instruments as it scrolled along her wireless clipboard, the girl kept reaching out to steer her clear of the camouflaged tiger pits the Warriors defended their turf with.

Elaine was like a magnet for teenaged girls — competent, beautiful, in charge. At the next stop, she handed the girl a can of pink spraychalk and directed her to mark the sightlines. The girl almost dropped the can, but then recovered and puffed up a bit, marching off to lay down the hot pink lines. The Warrior at the rear, a man of indeterminate age who wore a camou balaclava, rolled his eyes, but that was OK; Lee-Daniel was figuring out a way to get him engaged, too.

At the next stop, a bare ridge that overlooked the woods on one side and the public highway on the other, Lee-Daniel tapped the other Warrior on his shoulder, then gestured at travois on which Elaine’s juniors had been hauling their satellite tester. He cocked his head, then bent down to take one end, and the other Warrior fell in at the other end. The two juniors looked relieved and hitched up their packs, breaking out protein bars from their belt pouches.

And so it went. By the time they reached the next ridge, the girl (“Mermaid”) had introduced herself, and the man (“Cobra”) had done likewise, removing his balaclava to reveal a middle-aged face handsome but for the deep acne scars.

And so it went, for all the CogRad crews, who’d never had explicit training in making friends with the locals on a gig, but who had learned from the example set by Lee-Daniel and by the middle managers who’d learned it from him.

Elaine gave Mermaid a cheap theodolite with an integrated compass, GPS and altimeter, and a little booklet on how to use it, and the next time Lee-Daniel saw her, she was leading a group of even younger girls on a series of surveying missions around the Indian School. Elaine never had to do near-field surveys — she’d always get them free child labor for any settled areas. Lee-Daniel liked the idea that the people they connected were learning to work their own gear. He liked the idea that the people they connected were better for it.

“Privacy, please,” he said.

“We’re standing all the way over here,” the Series B man said, from the across the little table. “How much more privacy do you want?”

Lee-Daniel shook his head in exaggerated disbelief and then MacDiarmid led them back out to the communal area.

Once they were gone, he opened his phone and logged in to the administrative overview of all of CogRad’s networks. There was the Akwesahsne net, still thriving. About 20 percent of the terminals were offline, but the remainder had picked up the slack. He wondered how well camouflaged they were. He wondered if little girls with toy surveying gear were currently chalking out new locations for more terminals.

The network was alive with chatter from every corner of the rez, as the Warriors coordinated with the press who’d come to cover the stand-off.

He called Meatloaf.

“What,” he said. In the background, Lee-Daniel heard loudhailer-distorted speech, choppers, curses, panting.

“The network, it works good?”

“It works good,” Meatloaf said. “They’re trying to take it down. That must mean it’s the right thing.”

Lee-Daniel paced the small dining room. The table was littered with legal papers, papers that severed him from his business.

“They’re taking them down?” Lee-Daniel said.

“Yes, but we’re putting them back up. You left behind extras.”

“What will you do when those run out?”

“Buy more,” Meatloaf said.

“Don’t buy them,” Lee-Daniel said. “I can show you how to build them. It’s not hard.”

“Where are you?”

“Upstate New York. Near Buffalo.”

“If you go to St. Regis, east of you, they can get you into Akwesahsne.”

Lee-Daniel’s muscles throbbed with exhaustion. He felt the phone slip in his slick palms and he gripped it tighter, almost squirting it watermelonseed. He hacked a deep breath.

“St. Regis,” he said.

“I have to go,” Meatloaf said.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

“I don’t like this,” Mac said, the last morning in Akwesahsne. The CRTC choppers had been buzzing the rez for three days now — at first a few and then growing swarms of buzzing radio-cop helicopters a-bristle with antennae. “I don’t like it and I want to get gone.”

“I don’t like it either,” Lee-Daniel said, watching the encrypted RF chatter from the feds spike across his wireless clipboard. They were sitting in a couple of folding chairs by the side of the bus, eating hard-boiled eggs and drinking self-heating tinned coffee, waving away the buzzing clouds of blackflies.

Half a dozen Warriors stood by the cinderblock community center, eyes on the skies, having a slow, low-key discussion with Meatloaf.

“I want to finish the job, Mac,” Lee-Daniel said. “We’ll do the perimeter walk this afternoon and we’re done. It’s no good to do all this work and not finish the job.” A little girl giggled past him with a bit of surveying twine, further refining the kids’ map of the town center.

Mac looked up again at the choppers. There were four of them now, flying a slow perimeter patrol. “Tonight. We go tonight.”

“Tonight,” Lee-Daniel said. “Agreed. I’ll make sure that everyone’s packed up and ready to go.” He finished his coffee and put on his shades, then walked over to Meatloaf. The other Warriors walked away.

“Helicopters,” Meatloaf said.

“Yeah,” Lee-Daniel said. “About that.”

“Our people in Ottawa are asking about the helicopters.” Meatloaf hitched up his pants. “First they send social workers and kidnap us to residential schools. Then they send yuppies who take away our land to make golf courses. They send cops. They send the army. Now helicopters. We survived everything else, we’ll survive the helicopters, OK?” That was quite a speech for Meatloaf. Lee-Daniel took it in for a moment.

“That’s good,” he said. “Excellent. We’re going to be finished this evening and then we’re going to bug out, OK? If you’ve got a beef with the feds, that’s none of our biz.”

“None of your biz,” Meatloaf repeated. His fixed stare made Lee-Daniel want to squirm.

“We’re techies, not freedom fighters,” Lee-Daniel said. His clipboard beeped and he tapped it to dismiss the screensaver. “They’re trying to jam us,” he said.

Meatloaf nodded as if he’d expected no less.

“They’re trying,” Lee-Daniel said. “But they can’t. To squelch the short-range point-to-point links we’re running, they’d have to put out enough power to cook passing birds. Our nets interpret interference as damage and route around it.”

“It works even when they jam it,” Meatloaf said.

“Yeah,” Lee-Daniel said, grinning as he watched the piano-roll display of data scroll past. “You can’t stop Cognitive Radio without physical goddamned access. They’re going to have to dismantle the terminals if they want to shut us down.”

“None of your biz,” Meatloaf said.

“None of our biz,” Lee-Daniel said, looking away from the clipboard.

It wasn’t his idea to bring the investors along on the perimeter walk. This was a purely ceremonial event, only initiated once the real post-install survey had been completed and he was sure that there was network integrity. But networks must not only be integrated, they must be seen to be etc., so they split into two crews and walked the perimeter, or in the case of a territory as big as Akwesahsne, a symbolic segment of it.

They used ruggedized videoconferencing tablets as they went, digital clipboards whose screen was divided in two, each square with the feed from one of the crews. The data went over the localnet, and streamed out over the uplinks to residents of any other unwired Sovereign that wanted to welcome the newest rez to the party.

The two parties each took a direction and hiked out to opposite corners of the rez and then began walking counterclockwise, keeping in constant communication. A little blinkenlight in each quadrant mapped the throughput to and from that host, five bars all the way and not a single frame dropped if all went according to plan.

The investors were with the Northeast party, along with Joey Riel, Meatloaf and Mermaid. Not Mac, he was on the bus, where he usually spent the dusks and dawns, in air-conditioned gloom out of the mosquitos’ range. Lee-Daniel took the opposite corner, Southwest, with Elaine and the hard-line girl from the gate on the first day and Cobra, who’d taken to watching the sunsets with him and sharing a pint of forbidden bourbon, not saying anything, ducking the endless committee meetings.

They reached the perimeter and began to pace it off. Over the audio on the videoconferencing tablet, he heard the investors’ labored breathing, the slipping of their impractical Oxfords on the slick humus that carpeted the forest.

It was a nice early-fall day, with bloody streaks of sunset on the horizon and the crisp smell of damp and wind and sap dripping from the maples. Lee-Daniel loved an autumn walk in the woods, hell, who didn’t, and even with the choppers, he was pretty relaxed by the time he got halfway around the rez, an hour later, in the growing gloom.

It was then that bright beams of light stabbed at them from all sides. Behind him, he heard Cobra curse and then he was shoved aside and down as Cobra and the girl took up back-to-back positions with their weapons — a gas fogger for her, a hunting rifle for him — at ready.

“Sûreté,” Cobra hissed. Sûreté du Québec — the Provincial cops.

He’d done the research, knew that the SQ and the Warriors hated each other. The Mohawk Warriors Society had been fired in a kiln bricked with SQ beatings, shoot-outs and gassings. But the Akwesahsne Rez had been at peace for almost three years! The radio cops must be using them to do their dirty work. Why the hell couldn’t this have happened tomorrow, when they were on the road?

His radio network, that’s why.

Lee-Daniel knelt down and dialed down the screen brightness on his tablet, then peered at it. His half showed his long, narrow face, uplit like a jack-o’-lantern by the screen, eyesockets black and deep, cheeks hollow and stippled with patchy three-day beard. Two of the other quadrants were black — the tablets were offline or broken. The final one showed the Northeast party, skinny Joey Riel holding a thick branch in one hand and a rock in the other, ridiculous alongside Meatloaf and Mermaid, who had already fitted their masks and goggles and drawn their sidearms, crouching back to back against each other.

The investors hove into view, whey-faced, lips skinned back from their teeth, eyes crazy-white.

“Get down,” Lee-Daniel said, leaning into the mic. “Head to the bus.”

“It’s dark,” the Series A man said, jinking from foot to foot, making the camera sway seasick.

“The bus,” Lee-Daniel said. “Get in the bus. Get everyone to the bus.” Behind him, Cobra was talking on a handheld radio that ran on their network. They’d sold the Warriors over a hundred of them, and now they were using them, here, using their network, talking through the radio jamming.

“This isn’t our fight,” Lee-Daniel said, and heard Meatloaf talking, indistinctly, through the radio.

He looked around for Elaine, but he didn’t see her. Headed for the bus, that’s what you did in an emergency. Fuck.

It was an emergency. There was an even tramping of feet ahead of him, behind him, to his left and right. He stood, slowly, and put his hands in the air.

“I’m not a combatant,” he said, loudly, but in a steady voice.

He walked toward the bus, hands still in the air. “I am not a combatant,” he said again. A laser dot climbed his toe, his leg, centered on his gut. He looked down at it.

“They will shoot you, you know,” Cobra said. “They shoot. They think they’re playing cowboys and Indians.” He sounded very calm.

“I am not a combatant,” he said again, taking another step forward. A second red dot joined the first, climbing his leg and resting within inches of the first, dancing and bobbing like a firefly. From the woods, someone barked in French.

“You keep saying that,” Cobra said. “But you put in the radio, right?”

“I surrender,” Lee-Daniel said.

“They don’t speak English. When they don’t want to, they don’t speak English,” Cobra said. “If I were you, I’d get down and stay down.” Then he yelled something defiant in French. The girl behind him tittered nervously.

“Cobra’s making them mad,” she said, giggling again.

Lee-Daniel turned around slowly, getting away from the harsh white light. Green blobs swam in his vision. He began, very gently, to sink to his knees, when out of the corner of his eye, he spotted Elaine and two of her crew, in silhouette, up in the boughs of a maple that they must have climbed as soon as the SQ arrived on the scene. More steps from the brush, the light coming closer.

Cobra called out more French, three lights on him, his rifle at his shoulder. Two laser dots danced on him, and Lee-Daniel had an irrational urge to slap them away, like horseflies.

The young girl hit her fogger, spraying a thick, opaque cloud of gas. “Cover your eyes,” she said, and giggled again. Lee-Daniel pulled his shirt up over his face and dropped. He belly-crawled blindly, towards where he thought Elaine and her crew had been treed.

He knocked his head on a tree trunk and gasped involuntarily, getting a lungful of the gas, which made him retch into the depths of his shirt, bringing on more gasps and more retching. He rolled for the clearing’s edge, hit another tree and got to his knees, heaving like a dog. He still had hold of the tablet, and when he could open his eyes again, he looked into it, saw the investors still staring at him, wide-eyed.

“Go!” he hissed. “Jesus, get to the goddamned bus.”

“Are you all right?” they said.

“I’m fine,” he said. “Go go go!”

The CogRad drunk-ons were legendary. When you spent weeks at a time in the deep bush on dry reservations, lugging gear and fighting with bitch physics, you needed to unwind. It was traditional for a drunken riot to ensue on off-days. Lee-Daniel occasionally partook, enough to be friendly, but never so much that he lost control. He set a sane example, and the crew followed it, and so the most harm that a big booze-on would cause was a gang-wide neolithic hangover, swampy and hot and damp.

But the drunk-on that was proceeding when Lee-Daniel stumbled out of the dining-room was like a heavily sponsored Bosch painting. Elaine was alternately necking with and slapping Joey Riel; Mortimer was collapsed on a heap of still-steaming rum-toddy cartons; the customer service reps were playing kick-the-can with their ringing cellphones. The aerostats and the advertorial screens had automatically adjusted to overcome the ambient noise level, and were consequently pitching their jingles and come-ons at megaphone levels.

Lee-Daniel stared blankly around at his crew, hands clasped together tightly to keep them from shaking. He grabbed the first person he could lay hands on — the Tulsa switchgirl, beefy shoulders. Her name was Leeza, that was it, he could remember it now. She whirled on him, one hand clenched, and he stood, unflinching. She caught his eye blearily, breathing heavily through her nose.

He gave her shoulder a gentle squeeze, then righted a stool and patted it. She sat down.

He moved on to the next employee. And the next. He arranged them in ranks, and the din subsided. The drunkest CogRads kept on shouting, but they were in the minority. Elaine was hollering at Joey Riel, who was hollering back, cords standing out on both their necks.

Lee-Daniel felt a grin on his face, but didn’t know why it was there. He put his arms around their waists in an uncharacteristically intimate gesture. They started back from him, but he held them tight. He squeezed, and then gave them each a kiss on the cheek. Elaine snorted, then Joey Riel laughed. He led them back to the crowd of CogRads, lined up like drunken schoolchildren, and sat them down, then cleared his throat, swallowing a sudden sob.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

“Get down,” he said to Elaine. She was wedged into a crook and tied off with an improvised harness made out of nylon rope and carabiners from her vest. “We’ve got to get back to the bus!”

“They’ll shoot us,” Elaine said.

“They can’t see us,” he said. Laser sights danced in the fog. He heard the crack of Cobra’s rifle.

“He’s scared,” Elaine said. Next to her, also tied off — where did Elaine keep that many carabiners? — was a young surveyor, one they’d just picked up in Montana, a kid with a shaved head who had shyly asked him for a job after meeting Elaine at the local Army-Navy store and getting a tutorial on which gear to buy and why. He was wrapped around the branch like a serpent, locked at the ankles, thighs and wrists.

“So am I,” Lee-Daniel said. “They’re shooting. It’s natural. Get him down. Push him off the branch if you have to.”

“What about him?” she said, gesturing at the branch below her. There was another surveyor, a 40-something lunk who didn’t wash enough and farted too much and blamed it on other people. He was balding and his comb-over hung limply at one side of his head as he hugged the trunk.

“Push him too,” Lee-Daniel said.

The tablet, stuck in his waistband, spoke. It was the Series B man. “Don’t give them any more advice. You shouldn’t be liable for what they do in this situation. Return to the bus.”

Lee-Daniel shrugged up at her, caught a whiff of gas that set his eyes to watering and looked back at the clearing. Cobra was lying on his side, face away from them. The girl was holding his hand, face covered by a placid mask, but he heard her sob as she talked into the radio that was clipped to his chest. Lee-Daniel was momentarily mesmerized by this, his network in action, people living or dying by it.

A rustle nearby startled him out of it. “Now! Back to the bus!”

Lee-Daniel climbed the tree. He got up to the first surveyor’s branch, Ole Stinky, and he gave the man a shove. He fell like a stone. He stepped on Stinky’s branch, grabbed the kid by an arm and yanked, hard. The kid dropped, too. “Down,” he said to Elaine, and dropped, landing on the kid.

“Leave them,” the Series A man said. “We aren’t insured –”

He helped the kid to his feet, then Stinky. In the clearing, the Sûreté had surrounded the girl. Her hands were up, glistening with blood. One turned towards them and shouted something in French, raising his (her? hard to tell with the martian armor) sidearm. Lee-Daniel froze, and then a red dot appeared on the SQ’s leg, travelling up to his (her?) crotch. One of the other SQs pointed and the SQ with the gun looked down, then dropped his (her?) arm and leapt back.

Elaine jumped down, holding her laserpointer in her hand.

“Run!” Lee-Daniel said, shoving at the two surveyors, then taking off. A hundred yards downslope, he heard two screams and a sickening double thud. He stopped, looked downslope, then ran back up. Elaine’s crew was at the bottom of a tiger pit. The kid was crying and holding his arm at an unnatural angle. Stinky appeared to have landed on his belly, and when he looked up, his face was a mask of blood. They were both making a lot of noise, but not so much that Lee-Daniel didn’t hear the crunch of boots coming down the trail a moment before a light hit him. He turned and ran blindly in the moonlight, whacking into tree trunks, tripping.

The bus was crowded with CogRads and he vaulted up the steps and slammed into the driver’s seat, authenticating on the palm-reader and putting the bus through its warm-up/lock-down urban defense checklist. He was vaguely aware of more bodies coming in, then he slammed the door-close button as the shutters unrolled over the windows.

Outside, Warriors ran to and fro, carrying radios. His clipboard throbbed with traffic analysis.

They were already 20 miles off from the rez when he told Elaine that Stinky and the kid never got on the bus.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

The Series A and Series B men were huddled together out front of the roadhouse, along with MacDiarmid.

“That’s some scene, huh, boss?” Lee-Daniel remarked as he stepped into the cool night, sucking up the fresh air and the moonlight.

“Maniacs,” the Series A man said. “Out of control.”

“Just road-crazies. Like when they thought they all had West Nile. They get worked up. Egomaniacs and social retards.” He was speaking in the grudging half-sentences that Cobra had preferred. Talking like that made him feel crazy and brave and alien. “They’re OK,” he said. “They’re OK now.”

“What did you tell them?” MacDiarmid asked, softly.

“I said goodbye,” Lee-Daniel said. “I told them I wished them luck. I told them how fucking great they are, and how important the work is. They know it, but you need to remind them sometimes.”

“I’ll remember that,” MacDiarmid said.

“Don’t let these assholes drive the bus, OK?” Lee-Daniel jerked his head at the Series A/Series B men.

“Are you kidding?” MacDiarmid snorted. “Not on a fucking bet.”

They turned to look at the investors. Lee-Daniel didn’t know either of the investors’ names. Fucking spear-carriers, fronts for unimaginable, implacable wealth, charged with returning 400 percent over three years on a national-budget-sized fund.

He had a bunch of exit lines he’d thought of, but none of them mattered out there in the moonlight. He’d shown the CogRads the traffic histograms on his clipboard before coming out. Crazy stuff going on in Akwesahsne.

He used the clipboard to open the bus, stepped aboard and grabbed his duffel. A cab pulled up as Lee-Daniel left the bus. He tapped the roadhouse chip to the door, which swung open.

“St. Regis,” he said, leaning in to toss in his duffel. “You know where it is?”

“The Indian reservation?” the driver asked.

“That’s it,” he said.

“Yeah.”

Lee-Daniel looked up from the clipboard as the cab pulled away. The crew was trickling outside. He knew the surveyor out front, knew that he did tricks with a butterfly knife, that he sent money home to his little sister in Muncie. He couldn’t remember his name. He was no good with names. But he knew his people.

He looked back at the clipboard, cranked up the volume. Heard the panting, heard the babble, heard his new crew, using his radios. His hands shook. He put the clipboard down, plumped his duffel into a pillow, leaned back and closed his burning eyes. Heard the voices. He picked up the clipboard, started up a remote admin interface for the remaining Akwesahsne radios. He’d sleep later.

Liam’s death really screwed things up for Murray. He’d gone into one of those clinical depression spirals that eventually afflicted all the aging bright young coders he’d known during his life in tech. He’d get misty in the morning over his second cup of coffee and by the midafternoon blood-sugar crash, he’d be weeping silently in his cubicle, clattering nonsensically at the keys to disguise the disgusting snuffling noises he made. His wastebasket overflowed with spent tissues and a rumor circulated among the evening cleaning-staff that he was a compulsive masturbator. The impossibility of the rumor was immediately apparent to all the other coders on his floor who, pr0n-hounds that they were, had explored the limits and extent of the censoring proxy that sat at the headwaters of the office network. Nevertheless, it was gleefully repeated in the collegial fratmosphere of his workplace and wags kept dumping their collections of conference-snarfed hotel-sized bottles of hand-lotion on his desk.

The number of bugs per line in Murray’s code was 500 percent that of the overall company average. The QA people sometimes just sent his code back to him (From: qamanager@globalsemi.com To: mswain@globalsemi.com Subject: Your code… Body: …sucks) rather than trying to get it to build and run. Three weeks after Liam died, Murray’s team leader pulled his commit privileges on the CVS repository, which meant that he had to grovel with one of the other coders when he wanted to add his work to the project.

Two months after Liam died, Murray was put on probation.

Three months after Liam died, Murray was given two weeks’ leave and an e-mail from HR with contact info for an in-plan shrink who could counsel him. The shrink recommended Cognitive Therapy, which he explained in detail, though all Murray remembered ten minutes after the session was that he’d have to do it every week for years, and the name reminded him of Cognitive Dissonance, which was the name of Liam’s favorite stupid Orange County garage band.

Murray returned to Global Semiconductor’s Mountain View headquarters after three more sessions with the shrink. He badged in at the front door, at the elevator, and on his floor, sat at his desk and badged in again on his PC. From: tvanya@globalsemi.com To: mswain@globalsemi.com Subject: Welcome back! Come see me… Body: …when you get in.

Tomas Vanya was Murray’s team lead, and rated a glass office with a door. The blinds were closed, which meant: dead Murray walking. Murray closed the door behind him and sighed a huge heave of nauseated relief. He’d washed out of Silicon Valley and he could go home to Vancouver and live in his parents’ basement and go salmon fishing on weekends with his high-school drinking buds. He didn’t exactly love Global Semi, but shit, they were number three in a hot, competitive sector where Moore’s Law drove the cost of microprocessors relentlessly downwards as their speed rocketed relentlessly skyward. They had four billion in the bank, a healthy share price, and his options were above water, unlike the poor fucks at Motorola, number four and falling. He’d washed out of the nearly-best, what the fuck, beat spending his prime years in Hongcouver writing government-standard code for the Ministry of Unbelievable Dullness.

Even the number-two chair in Tomas Vanya’s office kicked major ergonomic azz. Murray settled into it and popped some of the controls experimentally until the ess of his spine was cushioned and pinioned into chiropractically correct form. Tomas unbagged a Fourbucks Morning Harvest muffin and a venti coconut Frappucino and slid them across his multi-tiered Swedish Disposable Moderne desque.

“A little welcome-back present, Murray,” Tomas said. Murray listened for the sound of a minimum-wage security guard clearing out his desk during this exit-interview-cum-breakfast-banquet. He wondered if Global Semi would forward-vest his options and mentally calculated the strike price minus the current price times the number of shares times the conversion rate to Canadian Pesos and thought he could maybe put down 25 percent on a two bedroom in New Westminster.

“Dee-licious and noo-tritious,” Murray said and slurped at the frappe.

“So,” Tomas said. “So.”

Here it comes, Murray thought, and sucked up a brain-freezing mouthful of frou-frou West Coast caffeine delivery system. G0nz0red. Fi0red. Sh17canned. Thinking in leet-hacker crap made it all seem more distant.

“It’s really great to see you again,” Tomas said. “You’re a really important part of the team here, you know?”

Murray restrained himself from rolling his eyes. He was fired, so why draw it out? There’d been enough lay-offs at Global Semi, enough boom and bust and bust and bust that it was a routine, they all knew how it went.

But though Murray was an on Air Canada jet headed for Vangroover, Tomas wasn’t even on the damned script. “You’re sharp and seasoned. You can communicate effectively. Most techies can’t write worth a damn, but you’re good. It’s rare.”

Ah, the soothing sensation of smoke between one’s buttocks. It was true that Murray liked to write, but there wasn’t any money in it, no glory either. If you were going to be a writer in the tech world, you’d have to be —

“You’ve had a couple weeks off to reassess things, and we’ve been reassessing, too. Coding, hell, most people don’t do it for very long. Especially assembler, Jesus, if you’re still writing assembler after five years, there’s something, you know, wrong. You end up in management or you move horizontally. Or you lose it.” Tomas realized that he’d said the wrong thing and blushed.

Aw, shit.

“Horizontal movement. That’s the great thing about a company this size. There’s always somewhere you can go when you burn out on one task.”

No, no, no.

“The Honorable Computing initiative is ready for documentation, Murray. We need a tech writer who can really nail it.”

A tech writer. Why not just break his goddamned fingers and poke his eyes out? Never write another line of code, never make the machine buck and hum and make his will real in the abstract beauty of silicon? Tech writers were coders’ janitors, documenting the plainly self-evident logic of APIs and code-structures, niggling over punctuation and grammar and frigging stylebooks, like any of it mattered — human beings could parse English, even if it wasn’t well-formed, even if you had a comma-splice or a dangling participle.

“It’s a twelve month secondment, a change of pace for you and a chance for us to evaluate your other strengths. You go to four weeks’ vacation and we accelerate your vesting and start you with a new grant at the same strike price, over 24 months.”

Murray did the math in his head, numbers dancing. Four weeks’ vacation — that was three years ahead of schedule, not that anyone that senior ever used his vacation days, but you could bank them for retirement or, ahem, exit strategy. The forward vesting meant that he could walk out and fly back to Canada in three weeks if he hated it and put 30 percent down on a two-bedroom in New West.

And the door was closed and the blinds were drawn and the implication was clear. Take this job or shove it.

He took the job.

A month later he was balls-deep in the documentation project and feeling, you know, not horrible. The Honorable Computing initiative was your basic Bond-villain world-domination horseshit, of course, but it was technically sweet and it kept him from misting over and bawling. And they had cute girls on the documentation floor, liberal arts/electrical engineering double-majors with abs you could bounce a quarter off of who were doing time before being promoted up to join the first cohort of senior female coders to put their mark on the Valley.

He worked late most nights, only marking the passing of five PM by his instinctive upwards glance as all those fine, firm rear ends walked past his desk on their way out of the office. Then he went into night mode, working by the glow of his display and the emergency lights until the custodians came in and chased him out with their vacuum cleaners.

One night, he was struggling to understand the use-cases for Honorable Computing when the overhead lights flicked on, shrinking his pupils to painful pinpricks. The cleaners clattered in and began to pointedly empty the wastebins. He took the hint, grabbed his shoulderbag and staggered for the exit, badging out as he went.

His car was one of the last ones in the lot, a hybrid Toyota with a lot of dashboard geek-toys like a GPS and a back-seat DVD player, though no one ever rode in Murray’s back seat. He’d bought it three months before Liam died, cashing in some shares and trading in the giant gas-guzzling SUV he’d never once taken off-road.

As he aimed his remote at it and initiated the cryptographic handshake — i.e., unlocked the doors — he spotted the guy leaning against the car. Murray’s thumb jabbed at the locking button on the remote, but it was too late: the guy had the door open and he was sliding into the passenger seat.

In the process of hitting the remote’s panic button, Murray managed to pop the trunk and start the engine, but eventually his thumb mashed the right button and the car’s lights strobed and the horn blared. He backed slowly towards the office doors, just as the guy found the dome-light control and lit up the car’s interior and Murray got a good look at him.

It was Liam.

Murray stabbed at the remote some more and killed the panic button. Jesus, who was going to respond at this hour in some abandoned industrial park in the middle of the Valley anyway? The limp-dick security guard? He squinted at the face in the car.

Liam. Still Liam. Not the skeletal Liam he’d last seen rotted and intubated on a bed at San Jose General. Not the porcine Liam he’d laughed with over a million late-night El Torito burritos. A fit, healthy, young Liam, the Liam he’d met the day they both started at Global Semi at adjacent desks, Liam fresh out of Cal Tech and fit from his weekly lot-hockey game and his weekend dirtbike rides in the hills. Liam-prime, or maybe Liam’s younger brother or something.

Liam rolled down the window and struck a match on the passenger-side door, then took a Marlboro Red from a pack in his shirt pocket and lit it. Murray walked cautiously to the car, his thumb working on his cellphone, punching in the numbers 9-1-1 and hovering over “SEND.” He got close enough to see the scratch the match-head had left on the side-panel and muttered “fuck” with feeling.

“Hey dirtbag, you kiss your mother with that mouth?” Liam said. It was Liam.

“You kiss your mother after I’m through with her mouth?” Murray said, the rote of old times. He gulped for air.

Liam popped the door and got out. He was ripped, bullish chest and cartoonish wasp-waist, rock-hard abs through a silvery club-shirt and bulging thighs. A body like that, it’s a full-time job, or so Murray had concluded after many failed get-fit initiatives involving gyms and retreats and expensive home equipment and humiliating early-morning jogs through the sidewalk-free streets of Shallow Alto.

“Who the fuck are you?” Murray said, looking into the familiar eyes, the familiar smile-lines and the deep wrinkle between Liam’s eyes from his concentration face. Though the night was cool, Murray felt runnels of sweat tracing his spine, trickling down between his buttocks.

“You know the answer, so why ask? The question isn’t who, it’s how. Let’s drive around a little and I’ll tell you all about it.”

Liam clapped a strong hand on his forearm and gave it a companionable squeeze. It felt good and real and human.

“You can’t smoke in my car,” Murray said.

“Don’t worry,” Liam said. “I won’t exhale.”

Murray shook his head and went around to the driver’s side. By the time he started the engine, Liam had his seatbelt on and was poking randomly at the on-board controls. “This is pretty rad. You told me about it, I remember, but it sounded stupid at the time. Really rad.” He brought up the MP3 player and scrolled through Murray’s library, adding tracks to a mix, cranking up the opening crash of an old, old, old punk Beastie Boys song. “The speakers are for shit, though!” he hollered over the music.

Murray cranked the volume down as he bounced over the speed bumps, badged out of the lot, and headed for the hills, stabbing at the GPS to bring up some roadmaps that included the private roads way up in the highlands.

“So, do I get two other ghosts tonight, Marley, or are you the only one?”

Liam found the sunroof control and flicked his smoke out into the road. “Ghost, huh? I’m meat, dude, same as you. Not back from the dead, just back from the mostly dead.” He did the last like Billy Crystal as Miracle Max in “The Princess Bride,” one of their faves. “I’ll tell you all about it, but I want to catch up on your shit first. What are you working on?”

“They’ve got me writing docs,” Murray said, grateful of the car’s darkness covering his blush.

“Awwww,” Liam said. “You’re shitting me.”

“I kinda lost it,” Murray said. “Couldn’t code. About six months ago. After.”

“Ah,” Liam said.

“So I’m writing docs. It’s a sideways promotion and the work’s not bad. I’m writing up Honorable Computing.”

“What?”

“Sorry, it was after your time. It’s a big deal. All the semiconductor companies are in on it: Intel, AMD, even Motorola and Hitachi. And Microsoft — they’re hardcore for it.”

“So what is it?”

Murray turned onto a gravel road, following the tracery on the glowing GPS screen as much as the narrow road, spiraling up and up over the sparse lights of Silicon Valley. He and Liam had had a million bullshit sessions about tech, what was vaporware and what was killer, and now they were having one again, just like old times. Only Liam was dead. Well, if it was time for Murray to lose his shit, what better way than in the hills, great tunes on the stereo, all alone in the night?

Murray was warming up to the subject. He’d wanted someone he could really chew this over with since he got reassigned, he’d wanted Liam there to key off his observations. “OK, so, the Turing Machine, right? Turing’s Universal Machine. The building-block of modern computation. In Turing’s day, you had all these specialized machines: a machine for solving quadratics, a machine for calculating derivatives, and so on. Turing came up with the idea of a machine that could configure itself to be any specialized machine, using symbolic logic: software. Included in the machines that you can simulate in a Turing Machine is another Turing Machine, like Java or VMWare. With me?”

“With you.”

“So this gives rise to a kind of existential crisis. When your software is executing, how does it know what its execution environment is? Maybe it’s running on a Global Semi Itanium clone at 1.6 gigahertz, or maybe it’s running on a model of that chip, simulated on a Motorola G5 RISC processor.”

“Got it.”

“Now, forget about that for a sec and think about Hollywood. The coked-up Hollyweird fatcats hate Turing Machines. I mean, they want to release their stuff over the Internet, but they want to deliver it to you in a lockbox. You get to listen to it, you get to watch it, but only if they say so, and only if you’ve paid. You can buy it over and over again, but you can never own it. It’s scrambled — encrypted — and they only send you the keys when you satisfy a license server that you’ve paid up. The keys are delivered to a secure app that you can’t fuxor with, and the app locks you out of the video card and the sound card and the drive while it’s decrypting the stream and showing it to you, and then it locks everything up again once you’re done and hands control back over to you.”

Liam snorted. “It is to laugh.”

“Yeah, I know. It’s bullshit. It’s Turing Machines, right? When the software executes on your computer, it has to rely on your computer’s feedback to confirm that the video card and the sound card are locked up, that you’re not just feeding the cleartext stream back to the drive and then to 10,000,000 pals online. But the ‘computer’ it’s executing on could be simulated inside another computer, one that you’ve modified to your heart’s content. The ‘video card’ is a simulation; the ‘sound card’ is a simulation. The computer is a brain in a bottle, it’s in the Matrix, it can’t trust its senses because you’re in control, it’s a Turing Machine nested inside another Turing Machine.”

“Like Descartes.”

“What?”

“You gotta read your classics, bro. I’ve been catching up over the past six months or so, doing a lot of reading. Mostly free e-books from the Gutenberg Project. Descartes’ “Meditations” are some heavy shiznit. Descartes starts by saying that he wants to figure out some stuff about the world, but he can’t, right, because in order to say stuff about the world, he needs to trust his senses, but his senses are wrong all the time. When he dreams, his senses deliver full-on THX all-digital IMAX, but none of it’s really there. How does he know when he’s dreaming or when he’s awake? How does he know when he’s experiencing something or imagining it? How does he know he’s not a brain in a jar?”

“So, how does he know?” Murray asked, taking them over a reservoir on a switchback road, moonlight glittering over the still water, occulted by fringed silhouettes of tall California pines.

“Well, that’s where he pulls some religion out of his ass. Here’s how it goes: God is good, because part of the definition of God is goodness. God made the world. God made me. God made my senses. God made my senses so that I could experience the goodness of his world. Why would God give me bum senses? QED, I can trust my senses.”

“It is like Descartes,” Murray said, accelerating up a new hill.

“Yeah?” Liam said. “Who’s God, then?”

“Crypto,” Murray said. “Really good, standards-defined crypto. Public ciphersystems whose details are published and understood. AES, RSA, good crypto. There’s a signing key for each chip fab — ours is in some secret biometrics-and-machineguns bunker under some desert. That key is used to sign another key that’s embedded in a tamper-resistant chip –”

Liam snorted again.

“No, really. Not tamper-proof, obviously, but tamper-resistant — you’d need a tunneling microscope or a vat of Freon to extract the keys from the chip. And every chip has its own keys, so you’d need to do this for every chip, which doesn’t, you know, scale. So there’s this chip full of secrets, they call the Fritz chip, for Fritz Hollings, the Senator from Disney, the guy who’s trying to ban computers so that Hollywood won’t go broke. The Fritz chip wakes up when you switch on the machine, and it uses its secret key to sign the operating system — well, the boot-loader and the operating system and the drivers and stuff — so now you’ve got a bunch of cryptographic signatures that reflect the software and hardware configuration of your box. When you want to download Police Academy n, your computer sends all these keys to Hollywood central, attesting to the operating environment of your computer. Hollywood decides on the fly if it wants to trust that config, and if it does, it encrypts the movie, using the keys you’ve sent. That means that you can only unscramble the movie when you’re running that Fritz chip, on that CPU, with that version of the OS and that video driver and so on.”

“Got it: so if the OS and the CPU and so on are all ‘Honorable’” — Liam described quote-marks with his index fingers — “then you can be sure that the execution environment is what the software expects it to be, that it’s not a brain in a vat. Hollywood movies are safe from Napsterization.”

They bottomed out on the shore of the reservoir and Murray pulled over. “You’ve got it.”

“So basically, whatever Hollywood says, goes. You can’t fake an interface, you can’t make any uses that they don’t authorize. You know that these guys sued to make the VCR illegal, right? You can’t wrap up an old app in a compatibility layer and make it work with a new app. You say Microsoft loves this? No fucking wonder, dude — they can write software that won’t run on a computer running Oracle software. It’s your basic Bond-villain –”

“– world-domination horseshit. Yeah, I know.”

Liam got out of the car and lit up another butt, kicked loose stones into the reservoir. Murray joined him, looking out over the still water.

“Ring Minus One,” Liam said, and skipped a rock over the oily-black surface of the water, getting four long bounces out of it.

“Yeah.” Murray said. Ring Zero, the first registers in the processor, was where your computer checked to figure out how to start itself up. Compromise Ring Zero and you can make the computer do anything — load an alternate operating system, turn the whole box into a brain-in-a-jar, executing in an unknown environment. Ring Minus One, well, that was like God-code, space on another, virtual processor that was unalterable, owned by some remote party, by LoCal and its entertainment giants. Software was released without any copy-prevention tech because everyone knew that copy-prevention tech didn’t work. Nevertheless, Hollywood was always chewing the scenery and hollering, they just didn’t believe that the hairfaces and ponytails didn’t have some seekrit tech that would keep their movies safe from copying until the heat death of the universe or the expiry of copyright, whichever came last.

“You run this stuff,” Liam said, carefully, thinking it through, like he’d done before he got sick, murdered by his need to feed speedballs to his golden, tracked-out arm. “You run it and while you’re watching a movie, Hollywood 0wnz your box.” Murray heard the zero and the zee in 0wnz. Hacker-speak for having total control. No one wants to be 0wnz0red by some teenaged script-kiddie who’s found some fresh exploit and turned it loose on your computer.

“In a nutsac. Gimme a butt.”

Liam shook one out of the pack and passed it to Murray, along with a box of Mexican strike-anywhere matches. “You’re back on these things?” Liam said, a note of surprise in his voice.

“Not really. Special occasion, you being back from the dead and all. I’ve always heard that these things’d kill me, but apparently being killed isn’t so bad — you look great.”

“Artful segue, dude. You must be burning up with curiosity.”

“Not really,” Murray said. “Figgered I’m hallucinating. I haven’t hallucinated up until now, but back when I was really down, you know, clinical, I had all kinds of voices muttering in my head, telling me that I’d fucked up, it was all fucked up, crash the car into the median and do the world a favor, whatever. You get a little better from that stuff by changing jobs, but maybe not all the way better. Maybe I’m going to fill my pockets with rocks and jump in the lake. It’s the next logical step, right?”

Liam studied his face. Murray tried to stay deadpan, but he felt the old sadness that came with the admission, the admission of guilt and weakness, felt the tears pricking his eyes. “Hear me out first, OK?” Liam said.

“By all means. It’d be rude not to hear you out after you came all the way here from the kingdom of the dead.”

“Mostly dead. Mostly. Ever think about how all the really good shit in your body — metabolism, immunoresponse, cognition — it’s all in Ring Minus One? Not user-accessible? I mean, why is it that something like wiggling your toes is under your volitional control, but your memory isn’t?”

“Well, that’s complicated stuff — heartbeat, breathing, immunoresponse, memory. You don’t want to forget to breathe, right?”

Liam hissed a laugh. “Horse-sheeit,” he drawled. “How complicated is moving your arm? How many muscle-movements in a smile? How many muscle-movements in a heartbeat? How complicated is writing code versus immunoresponse? Why when you’re holding your breath can’t you hold it until you don’t want to hold it anymore? Why do you have to be a fucking Jedi Master to stop your heart at will?”

“But the interactions –”

“More horseshit. Yeah, the interactions between brain chemistry and body and cognition and metabolism are all complicated. I was a speed-freak, I know all about it. But it’s not any more complicated than any of the other complex interactions you master every day — wind and attack and spin when someone tosses you a ball; speed and acceleration and vectors when you change lanes; don’t even get me started on what goes on when you season a soup. No, your body just isn’t that complicated — it’s just hubris that makes us so certain that our meat-sacks are transcendently complex.

“We’re simple, but all the good stuff is 0wned by your autonomic systems. They’re like conditional operators left behind by a sloppy coder: while x is true, do y. We’ve only had the vaguest idea what x is, but we’ve got a handle on y, you betcha. Burning fat, for example.” He prodded Murray’s gut-overhang with a long finger. Self-consciously, Murray tugged his JavaOne gimme jacket tighter.

“For forty years now, doctors have been telling us that the way to keep fit is to exercise more and eat less. That’s great fucking advice, as can be demonstrated by the number of trim, fit residents of Northern California that can be found waddling around any shopping mall off Interstate 101. Look at exercise, Jesus, what could be stupider? Exercise doesn’t burn fat, exercise just satisfies the condition in which your body is prepared to burn fat off. It’s like a computer that won’t boot unless you restart it twice, switch off the monitor, open the CD drive and stand on one foot. If you’re a luser, you do all this shit every time you want to boot your box, but if you’re a leet hax0r like you and me, you just figure out what’s wrong with the computer and fix it. You don’t sacrifice a chicken twice a day, you 0wn the box, so you make it dance to your tune.

“But your meat, it’s not under your control. You know you have to exercise for 20 minutes before you start burning any fat at all? In other words, the first twenty minutes are just a goddamned waste of time. It’s sacrificing a chicken to your metabolism. Eat less, exercise more is a giant chicken-sacrifice, so I say screw it. I say, you should be super-user in your own body. You should be leet as you want to be. Every cell in your body should be end-user modifiable.”

Liam held his hands out before them, then stretched and stretched and stretched the fingers, so that each one bent over double. “Triple jointed, metabolically secure, cognitively large and in charge. I 0wn, dude.”

Liam fished the last cig out of the pack, crumpled it and tucked it into a pocket. “Last one,” he said. “Wanna share?”

“Sure,” Murray said, dazedly. “Yeah,” he said, taking the smoke and bringing it to his lips. The tip, he realized too late, was dripping with saliva. He made a face and handed it back to Liam. “Aaagh! You juiced the filter!”

“Sorry,” Liam said, “talking gets my spit going. Where was I? Oh, yeah, I 0wn. Want to know how it happened?”

“Does it also explain how you ended up not dead?”

“Mostly dead. Indeed it does.”

Murray walked back to the car and lay back on the hood, staring at the thin star-cover and the softly swaying pine-tops. He heard Liam begin to pace, heard the cadence of Liam’s thinking stride, the walk he fell into when he was on a roll.

“Are you sitting comfortably?” Liam said. “Then I shall begin.”

The palliatives on the ward were abysmal whiners, but they were still better than the goddamned church volunteers who came by to patch-adams at them. Liam was glad of the days when the dementia was strong, morphine days when the sun rose and set in a slow blink and then it was bedtime again.

Lucky for him, then, that lucid days were fewer and farther between. Unlucky for him that his lucid days, when they came, were filled with the G-Men.

The G-Men had come to him in the late days of his tenure on the palliative ward. They’d wheeled him into a private consultation room and given him a cigarette that stung the sores on his lips, tongue and throat. He coughed gratefully.

“You must be the Fed,” Liam said. “No one else could green-light indoor smoking in California.” Liam had worked for the Fed before. Work in the Valley and you end up working for the Fed, because when the cyclic five-year bust arrives, the only venture capital that’s liquid in the U.S. is military research green — khaki money. He’d been seconded twice to biometrics-and-machineguns bunkers where he’d worked on need-to-know integration projects for Global Semi’s customers in the Military-Industrial Simplex.

The military and the alphabet soup of Fed cops gave birth to the Valley. After WWII, all those shipbuilder engineers and all those radar engineers and all those radio engineers and the tame academics at Cal Tech and Cal and Stanford sorta congealed, did a bunch of startups and built a bunch of crap their buds in the Forces would buy.

Khaki money stunted the Valley. Generals didn’t need to lobby in Congress for bigger appropriations. They just took home black budgets that were silently erased from the books, aerosolized cash that they misted over the eggheads along Highway 101. Two generations later, the Valley was filled with techno-determinists, swaggering nerd squillionaires who were steadfastly convinced that the money would flow forever and ever amen.

Then came Hollywood, the puny $35 billion David that slew the $600 billion Goliath of tech. They bought Congresscritters, had their business-models declared fundamental to the American way of life, extended copyright ad [inifinitum|nauseam] and generally kicked the shit out of tech in DC. They’d been playing this game since 1908, when they sued to keep the player piano off the market, and they punched well above their weight in the legislative ring. As the copyright police began to crush tech companies throughout the Valley, khaki money took on the sweet appeal of nostalgia, strings-free cash for babykiller projects that no one was going to get sued over.

The Feds that took Liam aside that day could have been pulled from a fiftieth anniversary revival of “Nerds and Generals.” Clean-cut, stone-faced, prominent wedding-bands. The Feds had never cared for Liam’s jokes, though it was his trackmarks and not his punchlines that eventually accounted for his security clearance being yanked. These two did not crack a smile as Liam wheezed out his pathetic joke.

Instead, they introduced themselves gravely. Col. Gonzalez — an MD, with caduceus insignia next to his silver birds — and Special Agent Fredericks. Grateful for his attention, they had an offer to make him.

“It’s experimental, and the risks are high. We won’t kid you about that.”

“I appreciate that,” Liam wheezed. “I like to live dangerously. Give me another smoke, willya?”

Col. Gonzalez lit another Marlboro Red with his brass Zippo and passed him a sheaf of papers. “You can review these here, once we’re done. I’m afraid I’ll have to take them with me when we go, though.”

Liam paged through the docs, passing over the bio stuff and nodding his head over the circuit diagrams and schematics. “I give up,” he said. “What does it all do?”

“It’s an interface between your autonomic processes and a microcontroller.”

Liam thought about that for a moment. “I’m in,” he said.

Special Agent Fredericks’ thin lips compressed a hair and his eyes gave the hintiest hint of a roll. But Col. Gonzalez nodded to himself. “All right. Here’s the protocol: tomorrow, we give you a bug. It’s a controlled mutagen that prepares your brainstem so that it emits and receives weak electromagnetic fields that can be manipulated with an external microcontroller. In subjects with effective immunoresponse, the bug takes less than one percent of the time –”

“But if you’re dying of AIDS, that’s not a problem,” Liam said and smiled until some of the sores at the corners of his mouth cracked and released a thin gruel of pus. “Lucky fucking me.”

“You grasp the essentials,” the Colonel said. “There’s no surgery involved. The interface regulates immunoresponse in the region of the insult to prevent rejection. The controller has a serial connector that connects to a PC that instructs it in respect of the governance of most bodily functions.”

Liam smiled slantwise and butted out. “God, I’d hate to see the project you developed this shit for. Zombie soldiers, right? You can tell me, I’ve got clearance.”

Special Agent Fredericks shook his head. “Not for three years, you haven’t. And you never had clearance to get the answer to that question. But once you sign here and here and here, you’ll almost have clearance to get some of the answers.” He passed a clipboard to Liam.

Liam signed, and signed, and signed. “Autonomic processes, right?”

Col. Gonzalez nodded. “Correct.”

“Including, say, immunoresponse?”

“Yes, we’ve had very promising results in respect of the immune system. It was one of the first apps we wrote. Modifies the genome to produce virus-hardened cells and kick-starts production of new cells.”

“Yeah, until some virus out-evolves it,” Liam said. He knew how to debug vaporware.

“We issue a patch,” the Colonel said.

“I write good patches,” Liam said.

“We know,” Special Agent Fredericks said, and gently prized the clipboard from his fingers.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

The techs came first, to wire Liam up. The new bug in his system broadened his already-exhaustive survey of the ways in which the human body can hurt. He squeezed his eyes tight against the morphine rush and lazily considered the possibility of rerouting pain to a sort of dull tickle.

The techs were familiar Valley-dwellers, portly and bedecked with multitools and cellular gear and wireless PDAs. They handled him like spoiled meat, with gloves and wrinkled noses, and talked shop over his head to one another.

Colonel Gonzalez supervised, occasionally stepping away to liaise with the hospital’s ineffectual medical staff.

A week of this — a week of feeling like his spine was working its way out of his asshole, a week of rough latex hands and hacker jargon — and he was wheeled into a semi-private room, surrounded by louche oatmeal-colored commodity PCs — no keyboards or mice, lest he get the urge to tinker.

The other bed was occupied by Joey, another Silicon Valley needle-freak, a heroin addict who’d been a design engineer for Apple, figuring out how to cram commodity hardware into stylish gumdrop boxen. Joey and Liam croaked conversation between themselves when they were both lucid and alone. Liam always knew when Joey was awake by the wet hacking coughs he wrenched out of his pneumonia-riddled lungs. Alone together, ignored by the mad scientists who were hacking their bodies, they struck up a weak and hallucinogenic camaraderie.

“I’m not going to sleep,” Joey said, in one timeless twilight.

“So don’t sleep, shit,” Liam said.

“No, I mean, ever. Sleep, it’s like a third of your life, 20, 30 years. What’s it good for? It resets a bunch of switches, gives your brain a chance to sort through its buffers, a little oxygenation for your tissues. That stuff can all take place while you’re doing whatever you feel like doing, hiking in the hills or getting laid. Make ‘em into cron jobs and nice them down to the point where they just grab any idle cycles and do their work incrementally.”

“You’re crazy. I like to sleep,” Liam said.

“Not me. I’ve slept enough in this joint, been on the nod enough, I never want to sleep another minute. We’re getting another chance, I’m not wasting a minute of it.” Despite the braveness of his words, he sounded like he was half-asleep already.

“Well, that’ll make them happy. All part of a good super-soldier, you know.”

“Now who’s crazy?”

“You don’t believe it? They’re just getting our junkie asses back online so they can learn enough from us to field some mean, lean, heavily modified fighting-machines.”

“And then they snuff us. You told me that this morning. Yesterday? I still don’t believe it. Even if you’re right about why they’re doing this, they’re still going to want us around so they can monitor the long-term effects.”

“I hope you’re right.”

“You know I am.”

Liam stared into the ceiling until he heard Joey’s wet snores, then he closed his eyes and waited for the fever dreams.

Joey went critical the next day. One minute, he was snoring away in bed while Liam watched a daytime soap with headphones. The next minute, there were twenty people in the room: nurses, doctors, techs, even Col. Gonzalez. Joey was doing the floppy dance in the next bed, the OD dance that Liam had seen once or twice, danced once or twice on an Emergency Room floor, his heart pounding the crystal meth mambo.

Someone backhanded Liam’s TV and it slid away on its articulated arm and yanked the headphones off his head, ripping open the scabs on the slowly healing sores on his ears. Liam stifled a yelp and listened to the splashing sounds of all those people standing ankle-deep in something pink and bad-smelling, and Liam realized it was watery blood and he pitched forward and his empty stomach spasmed, trying to send up some bile or mucous, clicking on empty.

Colonel Gonzales snapped out some orders and two techs abandoned their fretting over one of the computers, yanked free a tangle of roll-up, rubberized keyboards and trackballs and USB cables, piled them on the side of Liam’s gurney, snapped up the guard rails and wheeled him out of the room.

They crashed through a series of doors before hitting a badgepoint. One tech thought he’d left his badge back in the room on its lanyard (he hadn’t — he’d dropped it on the gurney and Liam had slipped it under the sheets), the other one wasn’t sure if his was in one of his many pockets. As they frisked themselves, Liam stole his skeletal hand out from under the covers, a hand all tracked out with collapsed IV veins and yellowing fingernails, a claw of a hand.

The claw shook as Liam guided it to a keyboard, stole it under the covers, rolled it under the loose meat of his thigh.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

“Need to know?” Liam said, spitting the words at Col. Gonzalez. “If I don’t need to know what happened to Joey, who the fuck does?”

“You’re not a medical professional, Liam. You’re also not cleared. What happened to Joey was an isolated incident, nothing to worry about.”

“Horseshit! You can tell me what happened to Joey or not, but I’ll find out, you goddamned betcha.”

The Colonel sighed and wiped his palms on his thighs. He looked like shit, his brush-cut glistening with sweat and scalp-oil, his eyes bagged and his youthful face made old with exhaustion lines. It had been two hours since Joey had gone critical — two hours of lying still with the keyboard nestled under his thigh, on the gurney in the a locked room, until they came for him again. “I have a lot of work to do yet, Liam. I came to see you as a courtesy, but I’m afraid that the courtesy is at a close.” He stood.

“Hey!” Liam croaked after him. “Gimme a fucking cigarette, will you?”

Once the Colonel was gone, Liam had the run of the room. They’d mopped it out and disinfected it and sent Joey’s corpse to an Area 51 black ops morgue for gruesome autopsy, and there was only half as much hardware remaining, all of it plugged back into the hard pucker of skin on the back of Liam’s neck.

Cautiously, Liam turned himself so that the toes of one foot touched the ground. Knuckling his toes, he pushed off towards the computers, the gurney’s wheels squeaking. Painfully, arthritically, he inched to the boxes, then plugged in and unrolled the keyboard.

He hit the spacebar and got rid of the screen-saver, brought up a login prompt. He’d been stealthily shoulder-surfing the techs for weeks now, and had half a dozen logins in his brain. He tapped out the login/pass combination and he was in.

The machine was networked to a CVS repository in some bunker, so the first thing he did was login to the server and download all the day’s commits, then he dug out the READMEs. While everything was downloading, he logged into the tech’s e-mail account and found Col. Gonzalez’s account of Joey’s demise.

It was encrypted with the group’s shared key as well as the tech’s key, but he’d shoulder-surfed both, and after three tries, he had cleartext on the screen.

Hydrostatic shock. The membranes of all of Joey’s cells had ruptured simultaneously, so that he’d essentially burst like a bag of semi-liquid Jell-O. Preliminary indications were that the antiviral cellular modifications had gone awry due to some idiosyncrasy of Joey’s “platform” — his physiology, in other words — and that the “fortified” cell-membranes had given way disastrously and simultaneously.

A ghoulish giggle escaped Liam’s lips. Venture capitalists liked to talk about “liquidity events” — times in the life of a portfolio company when the investors get to cash out: acquisition and IPO, basically. Liam had always joked that the VCs needed adult diapers to cope with their liquidity events, but now he had a better one. Joey had experienced the ultimate liquidity event.

The giggle threatened to rise into a squeal as he contemplated a liquidity event of his own, so he swallowed it and got into the READMEs and the source code.

He wasn’t a biotech, wasn’t a medical professional, but neither were the coders who’d been working on the mods that were executing on his “platform” at that very moment. In their comments and data-structures and READMEs, they’d gone to great pains to convert medical jargon to geekspeak, so that Liam was actually able to follow most of it.

One thing he immediately gleaned is that his interface was modifying his cells to be virus-hardened as slowly as possible. They wanted a controlled experiment, data on every stage of the recovery — if a recovery was indeed in the cards.

Liam didn’t want to wait. He didn’t even have to change the code — he just edited a variable in the config file and respawned the process. Where before he’d been running at a pace that would reverse the course of HIV in his body in a space of three weeks, now he was set to be done in three hours. What the fuck — how many chances was he going to get to screw around after they figured out that he’d been tinkering?

- – - – - – - – - – - -

Manufacturing the curative made him famished. His body was burning a lot of calories, and after a couple hours he felt like he could eat the ass out of a dead bear. Whatever was happening was happening, though! He felt the sores on his body dry up and start to slough off. He was hungry enough that he actually caught himself peeling off the scabby cornflakes and eating them. It grossed him out, but he was hungry.

His only visitor that night was a nurse, who made enough noise with her trolley on the way down the hall that he had time to balance the keyboard on top of the monitor and knuckle the bed back into position. The nurse was pleased to hear that he had an appetite and obligingly brought him a couple of supper-trays — the kitchen had sent up one for poor Joey, she explained.

Once Liam was satisfied that she was gone, he returned to his task with a renewed sense of urgency. No techs and no docs and no Colonel for six hours now — there must be a shitload of paperwork and fingerpointing over Joey, but who knew how long it would last?

He stuffed his face, nailing about three thousand calories over the next two hours, poking through the code. Here was a routine for stimulating the growth of large muscle-groups. Here was one for regenerating fine nerves. The enhanced reflexes sounded like a low-cal option, too, so he executed it. It was all betaware, but as between a liquidity event, a slow death on the palliative ward and a chance at a quick cure, what the fuck, he’d take his chances.

He was chuckling now, going through the code, learning the programmers’ style and personality from their comments and variable names. He was so damned hungry, and the muscles in his back and limbs and ass and gut all felt like they were home to nests of termites.

He needed more food. He gingerly peeled off the surgical tape holding on controller and its cable. Experimentally, he stood. His inner ear twirled rollercoaster for a minute or two, but then it settled down and he was actually erect — upright — well, both, he could cut glass with that boner, it was the first one he’d had in a year — and walking!

He stole out into the hallway, experiencing a frisson of delight and then the burning ritual humiliation of any person who finds himself in a public place wearing a hospital gown. His bony ass was hanging out of the back, the cool air of the dim ward raising goose-pimples on it.

He stepped into the next room. It was dusky-dark, the twilight of a hospital nighttime, and the two occupants were snoring in contratime. Each had his (her? it was too dark to tell) own nightstand, piled high with helium balloons, Care Bears, flowers and baskets of nuts, dried fruits and chocolates. Saliva flooded Liam’s mouth. He tiptoed across to each nightstand and held up the hem of his gown, then grinched the food into the pocket it made.

Stealthily, he stole his way down the length of the ward, emptying fruit-baskets, boxes of candy and chocolate, leftover dinner trays. By the time he returned to his room, he could hardly stand. He dumped the food out on the bed and began to shovel it into his face, going back through the code, looking for obvious bugs, memory leaks, buffer overruns. He found several and recompiled the apps, accelerating the pace of growth in his muscles. He could actually feel himself bulking up, feel the tone creeping back into his flesh.

He’d read the notes in the READMEs on waste heat and the potential to denature enzymes, so he stripped naked and soaked towels in a quiet trickle of ice-water in the small sink. He kept taking breaks from his work to wring out the steaming towels he wrapped around his body and wet them down again.

The next time he rose, his legs were springy. He parted the slats of the blinds and saw the sun rising over the distant ocean and knew it was time to hit the road, jack.

He tore loose the controller and its cable and shut down the computer. He undid the thumbscrews on the back of the case and slid it away, then tugged at the sled for the hard-disk until it sprang free. He ducked back out into the hall and quickly worked his way through the rooms until he found one with a change of men’s clothes neatly folded on the chair — ill-fitting tan chinos and a blue Oxford shirt, the NoCal yuppie uniform. He found a pair of too-small penny-loafers too and jammed his feet into the toes. He dressed in his room and went through the wallet that was stuck in the pants pocket. A couple hundred bucks’ worth of cash, some worthless plastic, a picture of a heavyset wife and three chubby kids. He dumped all the crap out, kept the cash, snatched up the drive-sled and booted, badging out with the tech’s badge.

“How long have you been on the road, then?” Murray asked. His mouth tasted like an ashtray and he had a mild case of the shakes.

“Four months. I’ve been breaking into cars mostly. Stealing laptops and selling them for cash. I’ve got a box at the rooming-house with the hard-drive installed, and I’ve been using an e-gold account to buy little things online to help me out.”

“Help you out with what?”

“Hacking — duh. First thing I did was reverse-engineer the interface bug. I wanted a safe virus I could grow arbitrary payloads for in my body. I embedded the antiviral hardening agent in the vector. It’s a sexually transmissible wellness, dude. I’ve been barebacking my way through the skankiest crack-hoes in the Tenderloin, playing Patient Zero, infecting everyone with the Cure.”

Murray sat up and his head swam. “You did what?”

“I cured AIDS. It’s going around, it’s catching, you might already be a winner.”

“Jesus, Liam, what the fuck do you know about medicine? For all you know, your cure is worse than the disease — for all you know, we’re all going to have a — ‘liquidity event‘ any day now!”

“No chance of that happening, bro. I isolated the cause of that early on. This medical stuff is just not that complicated — once you get over the new jargon, it’s nothing you can’t learn as you go with a little judicious googling. Trust me. You’re soaking in it.”

It took Murray a moment to parse that. “You infected me?”

“The works — I’ve viralized all the best stuff. Metabolic controllers, until further notice, you’re on a five-cheeseburger-a-day diet; increased dendrite density; muscle-builders. At-will pain-dampeners. You’ll need those — I gave you the interface, too.”

A spasm shot up Murray’s back, then down again.

“It was on the cigarette butt. You’re cancer-immune, by the by. I’m extra contagious tonight.” Liam turned down his collar to show Murray the taped lump there, the dangling cable that disappeared down his shirt, connecting to the palmtop strapped to his belt.

Murray arched his back and mewled through locked jaws.

Liam caught his head before it slammed into the Toyota’s hood. “Breathe,” he hissed. “Relax. You’re only feeling the pain because you’re choosing not to ignore it. Try to ignore it, you’ll see. It kicks azz.”

- – - – - – - – - – - -

“I needed an accomplice. A partner in crime. I’m underground, see? No credit-card, no ID. I can’t rent a car or hop a plane. I needed to recruit someone I could trust. Naturally, I thought of you.”

“I’m flattered,” Murray sarcased around a mouthful of double-bacon cheeseburger with extra mayo.

“You should be, asshole,” Liam said. They were at Murray’s one-bedroom techno-monastic condo: shit sofa, hyper-ergonomic chairs, dusty home theatre, computers everywhere. Liam drove them there, singing into the wind that whipped down from the sunroof, following the GPS’s sterile eurobabe voice as it guided them back to the anonymous shitbox building where Murray had located his carcass for eight years.

“Liam, you’re a pal, really, my best friend ever, I couldn’t be happier that you’re alive, but if I could get up I would fucking kill you. You raped me, asshole. Used my body without my permission.”

“You see it that way now, but give it a couple weeks, it’ll, ah, grow on you. Trust me. It’s rad. So, call in sick for the next week — you’re going to need some time to get used to the mods.”

“And if I don’t?”

“Do whatever you want, buddy, but I don’t think you’re going to be in any shape to go to work this week — maybe not next week either. Tell them it’s a personal crisis. Take some vacation days. Tell ‘em you’re going to a fat-farm. You must have a shitload of holidays saved up.”

“I do,” Murray said. “I don’t know why I should use them, though.”

“Oh, this is the best vacation of all, the Journey Thru Innerspace. You’re going to love it.”

- – - – - – - – - – - -

Murray hadn’t counted on the coding.

Liam tunneled into his box at the rooming house and dumped its drive to one of the old laptops lying around Murray’s apartment. He set the laptop next to Murray while he drove to Fry’s Electronics to get the cabling and components he needed to make the emitter/receiver for the interface. They’d always had a running joke that you can build anything from parts at Fry’s, but when Liam invoked it, Murray barely cracked a smile. He was stepping through the code in a debugger, reading the comments Liam had left behind as he’d deciphered its form and function.

He was back in it. There was a runtime that simulated the platform and as he tweaked the code, he ran it on the simulator and checked out how his body would react if he executed it for real. Once he got a couple of liquidity events, he saw that Liam was right, they just weren’t that hard to avoid.

The API was great, there were function calls for just about everything. He delved into the cognitive stuff right off, since it was the area that was rawest, that Liam had devoted the least effort to. At-will serotonin production. Mnemonic perfection. Endorphin production, adrenalin. Zen master on a disk. Who needs meditation and biofeedback when you can do it all in code?

Out of habit, he was documenting as he went along, writing proper tutorials for the API, putting together a table of the different kinds of interaction he got with different mods. Good, clear docs, ready for printing, able to be slotted in as online help in the developer toolkit. Inspired by Joey, he began work on a routine that would replace all the maintenance chores that the platform did in sleep-mode, along with a subroutine that suppressed melatonin and all the other circadian chemicals that induced sleep.

Liam returned from Fry’s with bags full of cabling and soldering guns and breadboards. He draped a black pillowcase over a patch of living-room floor and laid everything out on it, wires and strippers and crimpers and components and a soldering gun, and went to work methodically, stripping and crimping and twisting. He’d taken out his own connector for reference and he was comparing them both, using a white LED torch on a headband to show him the pinouts on the custom end.

“So I’m thinking that I’ll clone the controller and stick it on my head first to make sure it works. You wear my wire and I’ll burn the new one in for a couple days and then we can swap. OK?”

“Sure,” Murray said, “whatever.” His fingers rattled on the keys.

“Got you one of these,” Liam said and held up a bulky Korean palmtop. “Runs Linux. You can cross-compile the SDK and all the libraries for it; the compiler’s on the drive. Good if you want to run an interactive app –” an application that changed its instructions based on output from the platform — “and it’s stinking cool, too. I fucking love gear.”

“Gear’s good,” Murray agreed. “Cheap as hell and faster every time I turn around.”

“Well, until Honorable Computing comes along,” Liam said. “That’ll put a nail in the old coffin.”

“You’re overreacting.”

“Naw. Just being realistic. Open up a shell, OK? See at the top, how it says ‘tty’? The kernel thinks it’s communicating with a printer. Your shell window is a simulation of a printer, so the kernel knows how to talk to it — it’s got plenty of compatibility layers between it and you. If the guy who wrote the code doesn’t want you to interface with it, you can’t. No emulation, that’s not ‘honorable.’ Your box is 0wned.”

Murray looked up from his keyboard. “So what do you want me to do about it, dead man?”

“Mostly dead,” Liam said. “Just think about it, OK? How much money you got in your savings account?”

“Nice segue. Not enough.”

“Not enough for what?”

“Not enough for sharing any of it with you.”

“Come on, dude, I’m going back underground. I need fifty grand to get out of the country — Canada, then buy a fake passport and head to London. Once I’m in the EU, I’m in good shape. I learned German last week, this week I’m doing French. The dendrite density shit is the shit.”

“Man und zooperman,” Murray said. “If you’re zo zooper, go and earn a buck or two, OK?”

“Come on, you know I’m good for it. Once this stuff is ready to go –”

“What stuff?”

“The codebase! Haven’t you figured it out yet? It’s a startup! We go into business in some former-Soviet Stan in Asia or some African kleptocracy. We infect the locals with the Cure, then the interface, and then we sell ‘em the software. It’s viral marketing, gettit?”

“Leaving aside CIA assassins, if only for the moment, there’s one gigantic flaw in your plan, dead-man.”

“I’m all aflutter with anticipation.”

“There’s no fucking revenue opportunity. The platform spreads for free — it’s already out there, you’ve seeded it with your magic undead super-cock. The hardware is commodity hardware, no margin and no money. The controller can be built out of spare parts from Fry’s — next gen, we’ll make it WiFi, so that we’re using commodity wireless chipsets and you can control the device from a distance –”

“– yeah, and that’s why we’re selling the software!” Liam hopped from foot to foot in a personal folk-dance celebrating his sublime cleverness.

“In Buttfuckistan or Kleptomalia. Where being a warez d00d is an honorable trade. We release our libraries and binaries and APIs and fifteen minutes later, they’re burning CDs in every souk and selling them for ten cents a throw.”

“Nope, that’s not gonna happen.”

“Why not?”

“We’re gonna deploy on Honorable hardware.”

“I am not hearing this.” Murray closed the lid of his laptop and tore into a slice of double-cheese meat-lover’s deep-dish pizza. “You are not telling me this.”

“You are. I am. It’s only temporary. The interface isn’t Honorable, so anyone who reverse-engineers it can make his own apps. We’re just getting ours while the getting is good. All the good stuff — say, pain-control and universal antiviral hardening — we’ll make for free, viralize it. Once our stuff is in the market, the whole world’s going to change, anyway. There’ll be apps for happiness, cures for every disease, hibernation, limb-regeneration, whatever. Anything any human body has ever done, ever, you’ll be able to do at-will. You think there’s going to be anything recognizable as an economy once we’re ubiquitous?”

Every morning, upon rising, Murray looked down at his toes and thought, “Hello toes.” It had been ten years since he’d had regular acquaintance with anything south of his gut. But his gut was gone, tight as a drumhead. He was free from scars and age-marks and unsightly moles and his beard wouldn’t grow in again until he asked it to. When he thought about it, he could feel the dull ache of the new teeth coming in underneath the ones that had grown discolored and chipped, the back molar with all the ugly amalgam fillings, but if he chose to ignore it, the pain simply went away.

He flexed the muscles, great and small, all around his body. His fat index was low enough to see the definition of each of those superbly toned slabs of flexible contained energy — he looked like an anatomy lesson, and it was all he could do not to stare at himself in the mirror all day.

But he couldn’t do that — not today, anyway. He was needed back at the office. He was already in the shitter at work over his “unexpected trip to a heath-farm,” and if he left it any longer, he’d be out on his toned ass. He hadn’t even been able to go out for new clothes — Liam had every liquid cent he could lay hands on, as well as his credit-cards.

He found a pair of ancient, threadbare jeans and a couple of medium t-shirts that clung to the pecs that had grown up underneath his formerly sagging man-boobs and left for the office.

He drew stares on the way to his desk. The documentation department hummed with hormonal female energy, and half a dozen of his co-workers found cause to cruise past his desk before he took his morning break. As he greedily scarfed up a box of warm Krispy Kremes, his cellphone rang.

“Yeah?” he said. The caller-ID was the number of the international GSM phone he’d bought for Liam.

“They’re after us,” Liam said. “I was at the Surrey border-crossing and the Canadian immigration guy had my pic!”

Murray’s heart pounded. He concentrated for a moment, then his heart calmed, a jolt of serotonin lifting his spirits. “Did you get away?”

“Of course I got away. Jesus, you think that the CIA gives you a phone call? I took off cross-country, went over the fence for the duty-free and headed for the brush. They shot me in the fucking leg — I had to dig the bullet out with my multitool. I’m sending in ass-loads of T-cells and knitting it as fast as I can.”

Panic crept up Murray’s esophagus, and he tamped it down. It broke out in his knees, he tamped it down. His balance swam, he stabilized it. He focused his eyes with an effort. “They shot you?”

“I think they were trying to wing me. Look, I burned all the source in 4,096-bit GPG ciphertext onto a couple of CDs, then zeroed out my drive. You’ve got to do the same, it’s only a matter of time until they run my back-trail to you. The code is our only bargaining chip.”

“I’m at work — the backups are at home, I just can’t.”

“Leave, asshole, like now! Go — get in your car and drive. Go home and start scrubbing the drives. I left a bottle of industrial paint-stripper behind and a bulk eraser. Unscrew every drive-casing, smash the platters and dump them in a tub with all the stripper, then put the tub onto the bulk-eraser — that should do it. Keep one copy, ciphertext only, and make the key a good one. Are you going?”

“I’m badging out of the lot, shit, shit, shit. What the fuck did you do to me?”

“Don’t, OK? Just don’t. I’ve got my own problems. I’ve got to go now. I’ll call you later once I get somewhere.”

- – - – - – - – - – - -

He thought hard on the way back to his condo, as he whipped down the off-peak emptiness of Highway 101. Being a coder was all about doing things in the correct order: first a; then b; then, if c equals d, e; otherwise, f.

First, get home. Then set the stateful operation of his body for maximal efficiency: reset his metabolism, increase the pace of dendrite densification. Manufacture viralized anti-viral in all his serum. Lots of serotonin and at-will endorphin. Hard times ahead.

Next, encipher and back up the data to a removable. Did he have any CD blanks at home? With eidetic clarity, he saw the half-spent spool of generic blanks on the second shelf of the media totem.

Then trash the disks, pack a bag and hit the road. Where to?

He pulled into his driveway, hammered the elevator button a dozen times, then bolted for the stairs. Five flights later, he slammed his key into the lock and went into motion, executing the plan. The password gave him pause — generating a 4,096 bit key that he could remember was going to be damned hard, but then he closed his eyes and recalled, with perfect clarity, the first five pages of documentation he’d written for the API. His fingers rattled on the keys at speed, zero typos.

He was just dumping the last of the platters into the acid bath when they broke his door down. Half a dozen big guys in martian riot-gear, outsized science-fiction black-ops guns. One flipped up his visor and pointed to a badge clipped to a D-ring on his tactical vest.

“Police,” he barked. “Hands where I can see them.”

The serotonin flooded the murky grey recesses of Murray’s brain and he was able to smile nonchalantly as he straightened from his work, hands held loosely away from his sides. The cop pulled a zap-strap from a holster at his belt and bound his wrists tight. He snapped on a pair of latex gloves and untaped the interface on the back of Murray’s neck, then slapped a bandage over it.

“Am I under arrest?”

“You’re not cleared to know that,” the cop said.

“Special Agent Fredericks, right?” Murray said. “Liam told me about you.”

“Dig yourself in deeper, that’s right. No one wants to hear from you. Not yet, anyway.” He took a bag off his belt, then, in a quick motion, slid it over Murray’s head, cinching it tight at the throat, but not so tight he couldn’t breathe. The fabric passed air, but not light, and Murray was plunged into total darkness. “There’s a gag that goes with the hood. If you play nice, we won’t have to use it.”

“I’m nice, I’m nice,” Murray said.

“Bag it all and get it back to the house. You and you, take him down the back way.”

Murray felt the bodies moving near him, then thick zap-straps cinching his arms, knees, thighs and ankles. He tottered and tipped backwards, twisting his head to avoid smacking it, but before he hit the ground, he’d be roughly scooped up into a fireman’s carry, resting on bulky body-armor.

As they carried him out, he heard his cellphone ring. Someone plucked it off his belt and answered it. Special Agent Fredericks said, “Hello, Liam.”

- – - – - – - – - – - -

Machineguns-and-biometrics bunkers have their own special signature scent, scrubbed air and coffee farts and ozone. They cut his clothes off and disinfected him, then took him through two air-showers to remove particulate that the jets of icy pungent Lysol hadn’t taken care of. He was dumped on a soft pallet, still in the dark.

“You know why you’re here,” Special Agent Fredericks said from somewhere behind him.

“Why don’t you refresh me?” He was calm and cool, heart normal. The cramped muscles bound by the plastic straps eased loose, relaxing under him.

“We found two CDs of encrypted data on your premises. We can crack them, given time, but it will reflect well on you if you assist us in our inquiries.”

“Given about a billion years. No one can brute-force a 4,096-bit GPG cipher. It’s what you use in your own communications. I’ve worked on military projects, you know that. If you could factor out the products of large primes, you wouldn’t depend on them for your own security. I’m not getting out of here ever, no matter how much I cooperate.”

“You’ve got an awfully low opinion of your country, sir.” Murray thought he detected a note of real anger in the Fed’s voice and tried not to take satisfaction in it.

“Why? Because I don’t believe you’ve got magic technology hidden away up your asses?”

“No, sir, because you think you won’t get just treatment at our hands.”

“Am I under arrest?”

“You’re not cleared for that information.”

“We’re at an impasse, Special Agent Fredericks. You don’t trust me and I don’t have any reason to trust you.”

“You have every reason to trust me,” the voice said, very close in now.

“Why?”

The hood over his tag was tugged to one side and he heard a sawing sound as a knife hacked through the fabric at the base of his skull. Gloved fingers worked a plug into the socket there. “Because,” the voice hissed in his ear, “because I am not stimulating the pain center of your brain. Because I am not cutting off the blood-supply to your extremities. Because I am not draining your brain of all the serotonin there or leaving you in a vegetative state. Because I can do all of these things and I’m not.”

Murray tamped his adrenals, counteracted their effect, relaxed back into his bonds. “You think you could outrace me? I could stop my heart right now, long before you could do any of those things.” Thinking: I am a total bad-azz, I am. But I don’t want to die.

“Tell him,” Liam said.

“Liam?” Murray tried to twist his head toward the voice, but strong hands held it in place.

“Tell him,” Liam said again. “We’ll get a deal. They don’t want us dead, they just want us under control. Tell him, OK?”

Murray’s adrenals were firing at max now, he was sweating uncontrollably. His limbs twitched hard against his bonds, the plastic straps cutting into them, the pain surfacing despite his efforts. It hit him. His wonderful body was 0wnz0red by the Feds.

“Tell me, and you have my word that no harm will come to you. You’ll get all the resources you want. You can code as much as you want.”

Murray began to recite his key, all five pages of it, through the muffling hood.

Liam was fully clothed, no visual restraints. As Murray chafed feeling back into his hands and feet, Liam crossed the locked office with its grey industrial carpeting and tossed him a set of khakis and a pair of boxers. Murray dressed silently, then turned his accusing glare on Liam.

“How far did you get?”

“I didn’t even make it out of the state. They caught me in Sebastopol, took me off the Greyhound in cuffs with six guns on me all the time.”

“The disks?”

“They needed to be sure that you got rid of all the backups, that there wasn’t anything stashed online or in a safe-deposit box, that they had the only copy. It was their idea.”

“Did you really get shot?”

“I really got shot.”

“I hope it really fucking hurt.”

“It really fucking hurt.”

“Well, good.”

The door opened and Special Agent Fredericks appeared with a big brown bag of Frappuccinos and muffins. He passed them around.

“My people tell me that you write excellent documentation, Mr. Swain.”

“What can I say? It’s a gift.”

“And they tell me that you two have written some remarkable code.”

“Another gift.”

“We always need good coders here.”

“What’s the job pay? How are the bennies? How much vacation?”

“As much as you want, excellent, as long as you want, provided we approve the destinations first. Once you’re cleared.”

“It’s not enough,” Murray said, upending twenty ounces of West Coast frou-frou caffeine delivery system on the carpeting.

“Come on, Murray,” Liam said. “Don’t be that way.”

Special Agent Fredericks fished in the bag and produced another novelty coffee beverage and handed it to Murray. “Make this one last, it’s all that’s left.”

“With all due respect,” Murray said, feeling a swell of righteousness in his chest, in his thighs, in his groin, “go fuck yourself. You don’t 0wn me.”

“They do, Murray. They 0wn both our asses.” Liam said, staring into the puddle of coffee slurry on the carpet.

Murray crossed the room as fast as he could and smacked Liam, open palm, across the cheek.

“That will do,” Special Agent Fredericks said, with surprising mildness.

“He needed smacking,” Murray said, without rancor, and sat back down.

“Liam, why don’t you wait for us in the hallway?”

- – - – - – - – - – - -

“You came around,” Liam said. “Everyone does. These guys 0wn.”

“I didn’t ask to share a room with you, Liam. I’m not glad I am. I’d rather not be reminded of that fact, so shut your fucking mouth before I shut it for you.”

“What do you want, an apology? I’m sorry. I’m sorry I infected you, I’m sorry I helped them catch you. I’m sorry I fuxored your life. What can I say?”

“You can shut up anytime now.”

“Well, this is going to be a swell living-arrangement.”

The room was labeled “Officers’ Quarters,” and it had two good, firm queen-sized mattresses, premium cable, two identical stainless-steel dressers, and two good ergonomic chairs. There were junction boxes beside each desk with locked covers that Murray supposed housed Ethernet ports. All the comforts of home.

Murray lay on his bed and pulled the blankets over his head. Though he didn’t need to sleep, he chose to.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

For two weeks, Murray sat at his assigned desk, in his assigned cube, and zoned out on the screen-saver. He refused to touch the keyboard, refused to touch the mouse. Liam had the adjacent desk for a week, then they moved him to another office, so that Murray had solitude in which to contemplate the whirling star-field. He’d have a cup of coffee at 10:30 and started to feel a little sniffly in the back of his nose. He ate in the commissary at his own table. If anyone sat down at his table, he stood up and left. They didn’t sit at his table. At 2PM, they’d send in a box of warm Krispy Kremes, and by 3PM, his blood-sugar would be crashing and he’d be sobbing over his keyboard. He refused to adjust his serotonin levels.

On the third Monday, he turned up at his desk at 9AM as usual and found a clipboard on his chair with a ball-point tied to it.

Discharge papers. Non-disclosure agreements. Cross-your-heart swears on pain of death. A modest pension. Post-It “sign here” tabs had been stuck on here, here and here.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

The junkie couldn’t have been more than fifteen years old. She was death-camp skinny, tracked out, sitting cross-legged on a cardboard box on the sidewalk, sunning herself in the thin Mission noonlight. “Wanna buy a laptop? Two hundred bucks.”

Murray stopped. “Where’d you get it?”

“I stole it,” she said. “Out of a convertible. It looks real nice. One-fifty.”

“Two hundred,” Murray said. “But you’ve got to do me a favor.”

“Three hundred, and you wear a condom.”

“Not that kind of favor. You know the Radio Shack on Mission at 24th? Give them this parts list and come back here. Here’s a $100 down-payment.”

He kept his eyes peeled for the minders he’d occasionally spotted shadowing him when he went out for groceries, but they were nowhere to be seen. Maybe he’d lost them in the traffic on the 101. By the time the girl got back with the parts he’d need to make his interface, he was sweating bullets, but once he had the laptop open and began to rekey the entire codebase, the eidetic rush of perfect memory dispelled all his nervousness, leaving him cool and calm as the sun set over the Mission.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

From the sky, Africa was green and lush, but once the plane touched down in Mogadishu, all Murray saw was sere brown plains and blowing dust. He sprang up from his seat, laundering the sleep toxins in his brain and the fatigue toxins in his legs and ass as he did.

He was the first off the jetway and the first at the Customs desk.

“Do you have any commercial or work-related goods, sir?”

“No sir,” Murray said, willing himself calm.

“But you have a laptop computer,” the Customs man said, eyeballing his case.

“Oh, yeah. That. Can’t ever get away from work, you know how it is.”

“I certainly hope you find time to relax, sir.” The Customs man stamped the passport he’d bought in New York.

“When you love your work, it can be relaxing.”

“Enjoy your stay in Somalia, sir.”