Hungry (3 page)

“Fo’ shizzle,” I tell her, which reduces her to a fit of giggles.

“You did not just say that.”

“Straight from the Relics,” I admit. “We could go there and watch old 2-D movies.”

“Those things give me a headache. Anyway, can’t we do something relevant to our own demographic?”

“You only think those things are relevant because your algorithm says you’ll like them.”

“No, Thalia,” Yaz says slowly, like I’m an idiot. “My algorithm says I’ll like Spalons and EntertainArenas and PlugIns because I do. Most people our age do.”

“Well, there’s the problem,” I tell her. “I don’t like most people our age, so…”

“You don’t give them a chance.”

I slump down further on the stool. “They think I’m weird.”

“That’s because you are weird,” she says.

I ignore her and lean close to the Eye. “Have you ever thought you might like something the algorithm doesn’t even know about?”

“Like what?” she asks with a snort. “Reading books?”

That cracks me up.

“Come on, Thal,” Yaz whines. “I’m sick of being home. My mom is driving me bonkers, and I want to get this product placement going, and there’s a new game that just launched and…”

I cross my arms and stare at her. “Give me one good reason I won’t be bored off my ass there.”

“It’s new! Jilly, send Thalia info about PlugIn 42,” she tells her cyber assistant. A live video feed from the PlugIn pops up on the corner of my screen. I glance at it, see nothing of interest, and command it to close.

Sensing my lack of enthusiasm, Yaz says, “It’s in the West Loop. You’ll like that.”

I sit up a bit because she’s piqued my interest. “I thought it was just a bunch of abandoned buildings around there.”

Yaz plucks items of clothing from her pile and tosses them over her shoulder as she says, “Isn’t that what you like? Old abandoned crap that nobody cares about anymore?”

“You make it sound like a bad thing.”

“I heard it was a retail area. Restaurant equipment and textiles or something. You could probably find lots of weird stuff. Oh, here it is!” She slides her legs into a black jumpsuit then stands and zips it from ankle to neck. “It’s made from recycled inner tubes.” She steps back and models her outfit for the camera. “How do I look?”

“Tired.” I snort. “Get it? Tired? Like you’re made from tires!”

“Really?” she says, but I can see that she’s trying not to grin.

“Okay, not my best material,” I admit.

“Just come with me, would you? Maybe you’ll like this one.”

“Fat chance.”

Yaz siddles up to the HoverCam and cradles it in her palm. “Thalia, my little kilobyte, if you never leave the confines of your home, how can we have any fun?”

“I have fun,” I say.

She swats her camera away. “By text chatting with a bunch of cyber ninja freakazoids? You guys don’t even use video.”

“That’s to protect our privacy, and anyway the Dynasaurs are not freakazoids,” I say, but then I reconsider. “Okay, so a lot of them are pretty strange. But they’re my friends.”

She rolls her eyes. “Friends are supposed to be fun, Thal. Look it up. It’s part of the definition. Which is why I…” Yaz does a goofy dance in the middle of her room. “Am the best friend there ever was!”

I can’t help but laugh. Yaz has always been amusing if nothing else. “That may be true, but we have a different kind of fun in our little cyber group.”

She drops her arms. “No you don’t. All the Dynasaurs do is talk about how great things used to be and how everything sucks now, then they try to figure out how to break stuff so the rest of us can’t have fun either.”

“There’s more to it than that,” I argue, but only halfheartedly because basically she’s right.

Yaz shoves some stuff in her bag and says, “Anyway, would you just come with me? Hack the PlugIn security if it makes you happy.” Then she looks at me, forlorn. “Please? I don’t want to go alone.”

“Okay, alright, save it.” Our friendship has been the same since we met in toddler social time, where she constantly dragged me away from dismantling toys in a corner so she would have someone beside her. Plus, at heart, I think she believes she’s doing me a favor. That someday I’ll actually like something she drags me to. And sometimes I have to begrudgingly admit that I do enjoy myself, which is probably why I eventually give in. “Fine,” I say, acting way more annoyed than I am. “I’ll go with you. But it better be interesting.”

“Oh goody!” she squeals and dances. Then she stops and stares at me for a moment. “And try to wear something less embarrassing.”

“Hey!” I protest but she disconnects, leaving me yelling at a blank screen.

*   *   *

In my bedroom, I command the screen into a mirror and study my reflection, wondering if Yaz and my mom could be right about my clothes. They think I should be embarrassed by the way I dress because it’s different, but the truth is, I don’t want to look like everybody else. Especially when the rest of me is totally ordinary. My skin isn’t dark or light, just plain warm brown. My hair isn’t straight or curly, just long dark-brown waves over my shoulders. I have Grandma Grace’s narrow eyes, but mine are green like Grandma Apple’s. And when I’m happy, I have Papa Peter’s big smile just like my mom. But my chin with its little cleft and the dimple on my left cheek come from my dad, which Grandma Apple says is a carbon copy of my other grandfather, Hector, the only one in my family who didn’t make it through the wars.

I could cut my hair into some asymmetrical chop like other girls my age. Change my eyes or my skin or get some body art. But I’m sick of the holes and implants and ever-fading temp-i-tats everyone is obsessed with. My body’s not a screen. Beside, the inocs are bad enough. I don’t want anybody else poking me to rearrange my genetic makeup. Plus, the ways kids my age try to distinguish themselves just makes them look more alike to me.

Another tiny yawp burbles up from my stomach. I wrap my arms around my belly and press my lips closed to try to stop it, but I can’t. It’s like a speedboat motoring up my alimentary canal with noise from the engine echoing off my inner organs. My skirt isn’t the thing that’s going to embarrass me, so why should I bother changing clothes?

I turn off the mirror and figure I better find my Gizmo if I’m going to leave the house. “Astrid, wake up,” I command since I know it’s buried somewhere in my room. Within two seconds, the muffled voice of my PCA is begging for attention. I yank at the tangles of my comforter and clothes piled on my bed until my Gizmo drops to the floor and Astrid declares, “Sixteen new items!” while persistently flashing her screen. I don’t totally get the draw of a twenty-four-hour personal cyber assistant. To me they’re just nanotech with personalities more artificial than most humans. Which is why I reprogrammed mine to speak only when spoken to.

“Show messages,” I command. Astrid pulls up my message center and runs through new assignments for biochem, lit, and recent history (which I tell her to save for later) and a bunch of crap, especially Mom’s VirtuShops, which I run through so I can get rid of them.

“Lame,” I mutter when Astrid chirps, “You’d look great in these!” and flashes pix of me digitally modeling a pair of navy blue PolyVisq pants. “Did you lose weight?” she coos over my virtual self in slick red ElastiVinyl leggings. As if I would be caught dead in those. And the gaggiest of all: “Girl, those make your butt look scrumptious!” she says about my pixilated rear end in purple Teflon trousers. “Delete! Delete! Delete!” I command. When that’s done, I tell Astrid to go to sleep.

It’s not that I hate technology, just the kind that never leaves you alone. Like Yaz’s new HoverCam. So, as soon as Astrid’s happily snoozing wavy gray lines across my Gizmo screen, I switch to a stealth server so I can log on to the Dynasaurs network, using my hacker name, HectorProtector.

My dad is the one who showed me how to access these private, hidden channels without being traced. When I was twelve, he took me to an electronics graveyard, where I stood in disbelief at the mountain of motherboards, cascade of keyboards, and sea of screens. We picked through the surprisingly well-organized piles of digital detritus until we had everything we needed to build an old-fashioned homemade tablet from scratch, which dad called a jalopy because it reminded him of the beat-up old cars that guys like his great-grandfather built and raced way back in the 1950s. Next, Dad showed me how to access the Dynasaurs chat room so I could take my jalopy out for a spin without being traced. When I asked him why he was showing me how to talk to the enemies of One World, he said he wanted me to understand that One World’s appearance of total market domination was only as good as everyone’s acceptance.

These are the skeptics,
he told me.
The ones who will question the system and keep it honest if it becomes corrupt.

If One World wants complete freedom on the Web so they can dominate the global marketplace, then they have to let everyone else have access, too. Which is why it’s legal for the Dynasaurs to exist, even if what they do sometimes is against the law.
Their existence is a prime example of why Libertarianism works,
Dad told me. If there were no outlets for the skeptics One World would be perceived as a corporate dictator and more people might rebel. It just so happens, One World is very good at distracting most people from questioning the system by keeping everyone’s belly full and brain entertained. Except for the Dynasaurs. Their greatest source of entertainment is throwing wrenches in One World systems. And that means people like my dad are continually trying to outsmart the Dynasaurs by creating better cyber security. Honestly, I think my dad likes the elaborate chess game he’s playing with these guys more than he likes making new products.

Now when I log on to the Dynasaurs network, I don’t use a jalopy like I used to. Instead, I figured out how to crack the operating system of my Gizmo and reconfigured it to hop from stealth server to stealth server all over the world. So, within seconds of logging on, I’m having an untraceable conversation with my pal AnonyGal.

Hey HP was that you who pranked the ProPool Meet-Up Site last wk?

Unlike a lot of hackers, I work alone and I don’t leave signatures. This is a point of contention among some Dynasaurs who think that not signing your work is cowardly. I think those people get some weird kind of rush off the cat-and-mouse game they play with cyber security. Constantly changing servers, wiping cyber lives clean, and re-creating online identities seems like a lot of rigmarole for a little infamy. Personally, I’d rather stay under the One World radar, but I don’t mind recognition in the Dynasaurs forum every now and again, depending on who’s asking. And since AnonyGal has been around on the chat boards for a long time, I feel safe texting back.

What makes you think it was me?

AG writes,

Had all the hallmarks of an HP smack. Clean, elegant, and hilarious.

I never thought about my pranks having personality, but AG is kind of right. The hack was supersimple but had big results. I found a back door in the Procreation Pool Meet-Up Site system, then changed a few lines of the algorithm so that instead of being paired up with someone who shares the majority of your interests, you’d get a request from someone who was completely different. I write,

Grandma always said that opposites attract.

AG sends me a smiley face with the message,

Wish I could have been a spybot on some of those dates!

The thing is, I wasn’t trying to be unkind. I really do think it’s more interesting to meet someone who is different than yourself, and I’d like to believe that maybe my hack made at least one match in digital heaven before my work was undone by security agents.

As I browse around the general topix board, I see that earlier tonight AnonyGal posted a call to action:

Anybody see the new product launches in this week’s ICM dox? Looks like fruit ripe for the picking? Who’s in?

I haven’t bothered to look at my ICM dox—I never do—and I don’t like to join group hacks where people band together to find loopholes and back doors in the code of new products, so they can sabotage them before the launch. Some of the time it works, but most of the time One World finds and fixes the problems before the Dynasaurs act. I respect how AnonyGal works, though. She’s a master at delegating tasks to find holes in One World code. Basically, the reverse of how I work, which is probably why I like her. That and the fact that there are very few girl hackers my age.

I figure she must be young because she doesn’t sign off like the old-timers with the Svalbard symbol—a tiny sprout emerging from a seed above the word
Remember.
For the longest time I didn’t know what I was looking at when I’d see that symbol. To me, it looked like a weird alien fetus escaping from a pod. But then my dad explained the symbol and told me that it’s in honor of the Svalbard Rebellion, which happened after the last remaining seed vault near the Arctic Circle went belly up. World governments fought long and hard over who would control the seed vault until One World swooped in and promised to feed any population that capitulated to One World controlling their food supply, including the vault. One by one the governments agreed to let One World take over in order to save their starving masses.