Technobabel

temple. I grab his wrist and he looks at me with hard, dark eyes for a moment. "This is for your own good, my son. You must trust me." I realize that if Papa Lo or any of his people wanted to kill me they would have done it already, or simply left me in the alley to die, so I take the cable from his hand and slot it into the jack behind my ear like I've done it a thousand times before. It slides home with a faint click that shudders through my being, and I feel a sense of completeness I haven't since I was disco

"Where are we going?" I ask. The old man glances up at me over his shoulder, then begins slowly walking out of the room again. His voice carries back to me as he goes. "We're going to see if you can find your name," he replies, and I quickly move to follow. Papa Lo guides me out of the room and into the hall of what I now see is a deserted church, made over by the Netwalkers tribe into part of their home, our home, I suppose, if I am one of them. The place still has a quiet air of the sacred to it; not a place where people live day-to-day, but where serious and important spiritual matters are handled. In the basement of the church there is a room I had not expected to see, but which strikes me with an overwhelming sense of deja vu as I step across the threshold. I know I have been here before. The room fills most of the long basement space. The low-beamed ceiling makes it feel somewhat cramped and close. The walls are covered with hardware, displays, and complex paintings and drawings done on the gray concrete with brightly colored metallic paints and chalk. The drawings are circuit diagrams, flow charts, algorithms, and other images: great open vistas of metallic towers against a dark sky and planes of warped geometry that make you think you could put your hand through the wall like it was only an optical illusion. They bring the cold gray of the walls to life and seem to shimmer and move in the flicker and hum of the fluorescent lights hanging from the ceiling. The floor of the room is a tangled mass of cables in a rainbow of colors, like a nest of snakes sleeping on top of one another. There are woven mats and pieces of equipment networked together, computers, displays, printers, small storage drives stacked up like musty books, and collections of things that blink and whir and hum with power. Seated on the floor like a praying monk is a boy, about twelve or thirteen years old. His eyes are rolled back, and the half-closed lids nutter in a strange kind of dream state. His hands are folded in his lap as in prayer and his lips move as he whispers something, maybe a mantra. The sound of it is familiar to me.

"This is our lodge," Papa Lo says to me quietly, and I start a bit at the sound of his voice. I almost forgot he was there. "Our lodge?" I say, not knowing why I speak so softly other than the strong feeling I have that this is a sacred place. "It is our place to touch the power of the i