Lost Boys

"Leave the hall light on!" said Robbie loudly.

"Are you still awake, Road Bug?" asked Step.

"Don't nobody go to school tomorrow," said Robbie. "Not Stevie and not you either, Dad!"

"Don't I wish," said Step. He left the hall light on.

5: Hacker Snack

Here is how Step's days were spent: Most days he drove to work, leaving the car for DeA

He always began the workday by drifting into the programmers' pit, a large room with even more computers than Gallowglass's office. Most of the machines were already up and ru

But the truth is that while they knew the 64, Step had a gift for code and he knew it and they knew it. He could look at a routine for a few minutes and then rewrite it to cut the amount of memory it used in half, or make it run twice as fast, or make it smoother and more responsive on the screen. Back when he'd been working alone on programming, he thought of himself as a clumsy amateur, and he was always vaguely ashamed of his code. But now he realized that he was pretty good after all, or at least good enough to be better than the caliber of programmer that Eight Bits Inc. was able to attract.

Still, it wasn't too smart for him to keep thinking of himself as a programmer. Because whenever Dicky poked his head into the pit, Step had to drop back into manual-writer mode, asking questions of the programmer he was with about how the game worked. As often as not, he was asking about the very things he had just shown the programmer how to do, and as soon as Dicky left, the others in the room would erupt in silent laughter. But Step didn't think it was fu

Usually this took till noon, and he would go to lunch with a group of programmers and that was the good time during the day, because he wasn't lying to anybody then, he wasn't hiding anything, he was just himself, talking about stuff with these guys. It dawned on him during one of those lunches, as they sat there bantering with each other or swapping stories across the table at Swensen's or Pizza I

But these programmers were all male, and it was definitely a male kind of conversation, and yet there was none of that hierarchical one-upmanship that had made Step so uncomfortable with "the guys" in school. Or rather, there was, but it was centered around programming rather than athletics or cars, and on that playing field Step was a star-with Gallowglass, he shared the preeminent position in the hierarchy, and since he and Glass got along so well themselves there was no rivalry at all. Step belonged, and it felt good.

Lunch ended, though-supposedly after half an hour, but they always took an hour or more-and then back they went to Eight Bits Inc., where now Step usually went to his own office and actually worked on manuals, often for ga mes that weren't even finished yet. In fact, in the process of writing the manual he would really be designing the game, describing rules and features of the game that the programmer hadn't yet thought of. Or if he was writing about a game that was nearly done, he'd play the game over and over again to find bugs in the code or a

Because every game had to pass through his hands in order to get its documentation written, Step had his finger on the pulse of every project in the company. He knew, he knew what was going on. And since Dicky did not, it meant that in a way Step was the real head of the creative division of Eight Bits Inc. Dicky had the title and the salary and the Sunday afternoon visits with Ray Keene at the Magazine Rack, but Step had the respect and the influence and-most important to him- the results, the games with his fingerprints all over them.

The only program he never fiddled with was Scribe 64. That was Glass's bailiwick, and Step had no intention of intruding. He was writing the documentation for the new update, which was adding right-and- left justification and Glass's new 60-character screen, and while he still tested it and found bugs and passed them on to Glass, Step never, never touched the code. Because he didn't need to-Glass knew what he was doing. And because that was the unspoken basis of their alliance, that Step would do nothing to weaken Glass's position at Eight Bits Inc. So even when Step found a bug, he would pass the information to Glass in private, never giving a clue to anybody else that there had been the slightest flaw in the kid's original code.

Five o'clock came and went every day, but it had nothing to do with Step's schedule. He was always in the middle of something. There was always a section of code that he had to finish fiddling with before he went home, so he could leave it for the programmer to look at in the morning. Or a game that he had to finish play-testing at the highest levels, while the programmer hung 'around and kibitzed with him. Supper-time meant going around the corner to the candy machine and dropping in quarters. After a l few candy bars there'd be a bag of potato chips because there was once a potato involved, which made it health food. And then a can of pop or even tomato juice, when Step was feeling really unrighteous about what he was doing to his body.

He was gaining weight, he could feel it. Some of his shirts were begi

Seven, eight, nine o'clock at night, depending on how stub born the bug was or how fascinating the game, and Step would at last go outside into the darkness and find the Renault, pop the locks and climb in. Then he'd head for home, saying to himself, I should have gotten away sooner, I should have been home for di