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"Two ... one!"
As I stepped through the queue at the node, I felt a ripple along the wire.
What the heck was that? An untagged broadband crossed through the LINK.
"Yahoo!" Sharron shouted through the cab's open window. I opened my eyes to see her waving a fist in the air. Before I could congratulate her, she said, "Mouse rocks. Alarms are clanging from here to Timbuktu! I don't know how he did it, but it looks like hackers are popping up on almost every node."
Thanks to the confusion, I slipped easily through the next node. I was one step from Kick's. I slitted my eyes to concentrate, but I couldn't keep a grin from my face. As impossible as it first seemed, I might get away with this.
"Hold on to your avatar," Sharron beamed, "because here goes nothing."
She punched a key on her board triumphantly: I felt the LINK'S power dip again.
Fuck! A collective swear slipped through the system's censors. A full-fledged smile took over my face, as I passed through the last jump. If the broadband profanity censors had crashed, then the syscops had abandoned their posts. All I had to watch out for was the local patrol now.
Another terrorist attack, I think, someone said nearby. As I made my way along the entertainment band, snippets of conversation washed past me. The syscops weren't maintaining line privacy; chatter came from several users at once. I narrowly escaped Mexico City's node. I was hardbooted out of my game. Cairo is suffering some kind of brownout, I guess, because I just lost the signal! Where the hell are the system controllers?! Someone call the cops!
I slid out of the main byways to Kick's on-line cafe, a stationary and private spot on the usually fluid LINK. Despite the uniform's shifting ID pattern, my heart raced as my entry was automatically registered in the cafe. Though heads popped up to check me out, no one was interested enough to offer chatter. I let my breath out in a long sigh.
I feigned casualness as I checked the cafe's menu for the list of users. If my hands weren't virtual, they would have been shaking. Sca
"You got a guy named Kantowicz?" I asked Rebeckah out loud. "A Lieutenant John Kantowicz?"
"Not that I know of, but that doesn't mean anything necessarily. We organize in cells. I only know the ringleaders."
I glanced at the other names one more time. Like a tap on the shoulder, I felt my icon being chosen for chat-mode. Deidre? Is that you?
I turned to see the image of a police shield floating in front of me – no fancy, handsome avatar, just a shield. It could only be one man: Captain Morgan. I'm sorry? I'm afraid you've mistaken me for someone else.
It was a lame lie, but I prayed the armor's defense would keep the captain guessing. I hung up quickly, then selected Kantowicz's name from the menu. I had to act quickly. If I knew anything about my former captain, it was that he was very by-the-book.
Are you Da
A synthesized female voice calmly intoned, This is the police. We have secured a warranty and are initiating an address lock-down. Please stay on-line until your identifications have been processed. Any attempt to disco
"Shit," I shouted over the roar of the engine. "I was IDed. The cops just crashed the party. Sharron, are you off?"
"Powered down and out."
"Dee," Rebeckah's voice was urgent with concern, "you've got to get out of there. Drop the contact. We'll find another way to get ahold of Daniel."
"No. They've already got a lock-down – I'm busted either way. I might as well try a little evasive maneuver. Hang on."
Rebeckah yelled something, but I switched my concentration back to the LINK. I used the fact that Kantowicz and I were still co
What are you doing? Kantowicz shouted in protest. I could feel him resisting dissolution.
We're going under the door, like a mouse. Trust me.
Trust you? Who are you? Your ID keeps shifting.
A friend of Daniel's. I continued to pull him down, underneath the LINK the way Mouse had coached me earlier. We dropped through the floor easily. When we came to the police lock-down barrier, I felt a slight electric shock as we squeezed under it. Kantowicz and I got as far as Mouse's door before I realized I didn't have a key or a password.
Glancing back up at Kick's, I knew we couldn't go back. If the cops arrested my LINK address, I'd be a comatose homing beacon until they found my body. Rebeckah would keep me moving for a while, but she was a practical woman; she'd have to abandon my body eventually. I'd wake up in a holding cell, where I'd rot until they could prosecute me for what I did to Dorshak and the FBI agents during my grand escape from the precinct. Arrest now would mean the end of everything. No chance to see Daniel again. No chance to fix things with Michael, if that's even what I wanted. The rest of my life would be nothing but regrets.
There was no other option; I had to try to hack mouse.net.
//This electronic story, can be viewed either in full virtual reality LINK-interface, or is available in faux leather-bound hard copy for only 100 Christendom credits.
How the LINK-Angels Spoke to Me: A Collection of Personal Stories
A Boston Activist
Tony Delapalana, of Boston, who refers to his former life as that of "your average delivery guy," used to spend much of his time in the service tu
"It was like this," he explains. "A lot of people are afraid of death, but I'm a good Catholic boy, see? So, when Phanuel started haunting my dreams – being all spooky and that – I figured it was like Scrooge, you know, in that Christmas story: the ghost was trying to tell me something. For all my catechism, I never even heard of this Phanuel character before, but a miracle is a miracle, right? Anyway, I keep having these dreams where Phanuel is crucified. Only, instead of being nailed to a cross, he's, like, hanging from this big redwood. There aren't that many of the big trees left, so I figure this must be really important.
"So, I'm really wracking my brains: why is the angel of death the first guy to show up? Why am I dreaming about trees? So I start LINKing to all the sites about what the Church is saying, and my priest starts this whole study group and, anyway, it all sort of gels for me. It's about the apocalypse. It's coming soon. And, then I remember how on the Last Day, we're all supposed to rise up bodily, like Jesus. This realization freaks me out, right? It occurs to me that people aren't getting buried anymore because there ain't no more room in the i
Mr. Delapalana is personally responsible for starting the "Last Day" movement, which has wrestled 5% of the national forest lands out from under the secular ecoterrorist's control. His organization sees to it that anyone who wants a traditional burial can now have a plot set aside for them. Many consider the rough-and-tumble Mr. Delapalana a wild-man figure, like John the Baptist. By resanctifying burial, as John did for baptism, Mr. Delapalana has proven to be a prophet for our times.