XGeneration 1: You Don't Know Me (4 page)

Scott pressed his lips together and said nothing.

“Oh, just spit it out, half-wit.”

Scott sighed. “We’ve been over this. I enter the network. I listen. I feel. That’s all I can tell you. I don’t know how it happens, I don’t know why it works. It just does. If you can’t accept it, that’s your problem.”

Another long, buzzing silence.

“Share everything.”

“What?”

“That was the promise, the Hacker’s Pact.
Share everything.
” Wayne’s voice trembled over the line. “I-I’m the one who got you into phreaking. I’m the one who turned you onto ARPANet. And you keep pulling this… this crap! I’m going to ask you one more time. How did you get in?”

“I just told you.”

“Ass-wad.”

The line clicked. Scott set the phone aside to help J.R. squirm out of his stupid dog sweater. Freed from his knitted bondage, J.R. leaped into a pile of clothes and proceeded to dig out a bed.

Scott pushed himself from his desk. When his knees cracked, he realized it was the first time he’d stood since the night before, some twenty hours earlier. He staggered through a scatter of empty RC Cola cans, edged past his clothes-draped dresser, between teetering boxes of comic books (the one thing for which he actually had a semi-coherent system of organization) and found his bed. He stretched to his full length, his heels reaching beyond the end of a mattress he had outgrown, featuring a faded Buck Rogers fitted sheet with Twiki the robot. Overhead, model spaceships swung on threads from the AC vent.

With a gangly leg, Scott pushed aside a couple of Bell South technical manuals, and with the other, a copy of
1984
, which he had yet to even crack.
Crap. School tomorrow
. Which meant the summer’s hacking marathons were over.

He dropped his glasses on his chest and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his palms, making stars explode across his vision. He tried telling himself he’d still have nights and weekends, but the notion only depressed him. The thought of sitting through seven classes, computerless, modemless, in a new school, surrounded by a new class of cretins bent on making his life hell…

But Janis will be there.

Her sunlit face from that morning glimmered in his mind’s eye. Scott laced his fingers behind his stiff hair, reveling and suffering in the image. It seemed impossible that a younger version of the same girl used to speak to him, smirk at his jokes, sock him in the shoulder, hold his hand.

Forgetting his hack and his fight with Wayne, Scott drew his softest pillow around and nuzzled against it. Still holding the image of Janis’s face, he tried to imagine the feel of his fingers running through her hair, holding her cheek. He closed his eyes. Slowly, he began pressing his lips to the pillow.

A hard rap sounded on the door. “Dinner!”

Scott thrashed to a sitting position, terrified his mother had opened the door—relieved to find she had not this time. He waited for her sharp footfalls to retreat down the carpeted hallway before kicking out of his pajama bottoms and pulling on a pair of shorts and a mismatched collared shirt. He went to his computer and stared down on it. Once more, his finger hovered over the RETURN key.

This time, he punched it.

.....

.....

** WELCOME **

Sunday, 24-AUG-84 5:13pm-PDT

>

The fatigue left Scott’s body at once. He started to laugh. He had done it. Barely fourteen years old, and he was privy to the stuff of Matthew Broderick movies and hacker dreams.

He typed in “HELP” to be sure, watching as all of the possible commands marched down his screen in two columns. And because he was an administrator (so far as the system knew) an extra column scrolled out, listing his root privileges. Scott thumped his sternum with his fist, cringing a little at the force of the blow. But there it was: the power to create or delete accounts, change passwords, destroy files—hell, shut down the entire system if he wanted to.

Instead, Scott reached across to power up his printer. This one would go into the box at the back of his closet along with the others. Proof. Sweet, indisputable proof. But when his elbow knocked over the cordless phone, the consequences of popping off about the hack gut-punched the rush right out of him.

Dumb. Really frigging dumb.

Because to lose Wayne as a best friend wasn’t just to lose Wayne. Wayne would turn Craig and Chun against him as well. He had done it before. And how was that for starting high school, which was going to suck as it was? Computerless, modemless, and now friendless.

Scott eyed the phone, hesitated, then hit the speed dial for Wayne. He listened to the tones pulse out and waited for the ring.

But before the phone
could
ring, he mashed the phone off. Scott stood frozen. The receiver droned in his hand. The monitor in front of him, with its incriminating command lines, flashed with each hard swish of blood inside his ears. Scott exited Army Information, logged out of ARPANet, and, in a fury of typing, deleted the backdoor account he and Wayne had created at the university.

He turned everything off, even his modem. Especially his modem.

The room went black. Behind his desk, Scott squirmed inside the snake’s nest of cords, yanking every plug from the power strip, already begging his parents’ forgiveness in his mind. His breath came in strangled gasps. He kept hearing—no,
feeling
—that interval between the final pulses for Wayne’s number and the ring. A matter of milliseconds, probably, but it didn’t matter. It had been milliseconds too long.

When he stood, the room wavered around him. The corner street light came on, illuminating his blinds. At the same moment, something damp touched Scott’s calf. He nearly screamed. J.R. nosed him again and then gave a tentative lick. Scott collapsed to his haunches, the strength gone from his legs. He rubbed the stiff curls around J.R.’s vanity collar.

“This is bad, buddy,” Scott mumbled. “Really bad.”

Because those milliseconds too long meant one thing to Scott, and one thing only. His phone line, his calls, his hacks—it was all being monitored.

4

“How well do you know Mr. Leonard?” Janis asked.

Her mother’s face appeared over the top of the mustard-colored refrigerator door. Even from across the kitchen table, Janis could see lines forming between her brows. “Mr. Leonard?”

“Yeah,” Janis said. “The neighbor behind us.”

Janis edged her gaze to her father, who had paused mid-chew to listen to the evening news on the TV. Margaret appeared equally absorbed in the anchor, who spoke gravely over their dinner: “NATO is proceeding with plans to deploy six hundred new American missiles in Europe. The comments came following the Soviet Union’s announcement Saturday that it had conducted successful tests of its ground-launched cruise missiles.”

Their father grunted and resumed eating.

“Well, they both seem nice enough,” her mother said, closing the refrigerator door and returning with a fresh bowl of grated orange cheddar. She was wearing tan slacks and a print blouse—modern housewife attire, she called it. “Tend to keep to themselves. Why do you ask?”

Because I think Mr. Leonard has been watching us.

“Just curious,” Janis said, gesturing impatiently for her mother to sit and eat. Everyone else was almost done with their first taco while her mother had yet to even start dressing hers.

“Did he say something to you?”

Janis shook her head and pretended to become interested in the news. Her mother, who made it a habit to stress over everything, remained staring at her, worry lines proliferating around her pale blue eyes.

Should never have opened my mouth.

The news segment ended, and the ubiquitous commercial for Viper Industries came on: “In these challenging times, the security of the United States and its citizens cannot be underfunded. Call your congressperson and ask them to hasten approval of the V4 missile system, the next generation of—”

Her father muted the television. “What was that about Mr. Leonard?”

Oh, for the love of…

“He was at the beach today,” Margaret answered for her—a not uncommon occurrence, especially when her sister had no idea what was being discussed. “I just hope he covered that chrome dome of his.”

Their father began spooning ground beef into the bottom of his second taco. He was staid-faced, with stiff gray hair receding blade-like above his tanned temples. Their mother was younger, with Dee Wallace blond hair but paler than their father, more careworn. They had met in college as many couples did—only he had been her political science professor, more than ten years her senior. “Rescued her from the long-haired hippies,” he often joked.

“When does soccer start?” he asked.

“Tryouts in four weeks,” she replied, grateful for the change of topic.

“Are you ready?”

“I will be. Gonna put in an hour of garage practice after dinner and a half-hour of dive and rolls in the side yard. Samantha’s coming over this weekend so we can practice up in The Grove.”

“Atta girl.” he said, winking. He had lettered in three sports in college, and though he never said so, Janis could tell he was pleased one of his daughters had inherited his passion for athletics. And that, in turn, pleased Janis.

The news came back on, and her father unmuted the television.

“…on a campaign stop in Ohio, President Reagan answered questions about a proposed summit with the Soviet Union.”

“Our governments have had serious differences,” Reagan said from an outdoor lectern, the wind tossing graying strands of hair from his steep side part. “But I stand by what I have said repeatedly: If their government wants peace, there will be peace.” As he gripped the sides of the lectern, his grandfatherly voice began to shake. “Russians, hear this: A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought. The only value in our two nations possessing nuclear weapons is to ensure they will never be used.”

“So far,” the anchor concluded, “the Soviet leadership has expressed no willingness to meet.”

“And they’re not going to,” Janis’s father said. “Secretary Chernenko is as rooted in moldy Soviet-think as his predecessor.”

“Oh, we don’t know that,” her mother whispered, the lines around her eyes seeming to grow taut. She looked from her husband to Janis, trying to smile, then down to her plate.

* * *

That night, Janis had the dream again, the
experience
.

But another dream preceded it, and in this one, she was back on the beach blanket, the soccer ball beneath her head. People were everywhere, the beach even more crowded than it had been that day. Margaret’s friends were talking too close, debating about the hottest member of Duran Duran. “Rio” blared from the boom box, but it sounded warped—one moment chipmunk speed, the next slow and nauseating. Janis got up and pushed her way past Margaret’s friends toward the sound of the surf. Underfoot, the sand firmed and dampened, making a sucking sound each time her foot flexed.

Soon, she found herself alone before the ocean. But the ocean looked larger, more daunting, and she squinted to see the faint line of the horizon. Across all of that water was no change, no point of reference, just endless gunmetal gray—like the sky. Janis hugged her shoulders and began to shiver. The season was no longer summer but pale winter.

She turned, seeking warmth, seeking people. Most of all, she sought Margaret. But Margaret was nowhere; the beach stood empty. Miles of sand rose, coarse and untrammeled, into dunes of wild sea grass.

Something flashed and rumbled. Janis spun back around. Far off over the ocean gathered the same black clouds that had threatened earlier, but these clouds were rising into… an hourglass? Yes, a giant hourglass blooming at the top. But no, not blooming, Janis saw in dawning terror.

Mushrooming.

A low line of clouds the thickness of a blade blasted inland. A blistering wind dashed through her hair. The mushroom grew taller, its cap more corpulent, rivaling the very ocean for size.

“Margaret!” she cried, but it came out a murmur.

The air stung Janis’s nostrils as if something toxic were burning. She fled from the water, knowing only that she needed to get away, needed to escape inland. A fireball smashed into the beach no more than ten feet to her right. Globules of melted sand splashed up. Another fireball landed to her left, and Janis screamed because she knew the next one was going to be the one to strike her. And moments later, as her legs swam against the inexorable pull of the sand, it did.

The sound—a walloping roar inside both ears—jolted Janis awake.

But she was not in her bed.

She stood in her backyard, beside the island of oak trees and azalea bushes where her mother had recently planted a row of caladiums. English ivy crept ink-like from the house, curling into tendrils near her toes. Vibrations coursed the length of her body and thrummed inside her head:
WHOOSH-WHOOSH-WHOOSH
. It was the same feeling she’d had in similar dreams that summer.

Similar out-of-body experiences.

Keep it together,
she told herself.
Just keep it together.

The backyard was dark, the household asleep. No light shone from her father’s study or bathroom. Janis guessed it was after midnight. It dawned on her that she would also be inside, sleeping. And yet here she was, out in the yard, shimmering shapes playing across her vision.

When she first began to experience this state, she couldn’t move or see. The shimmering shapes were as chaotic as the energies that ravaged her senses.
Am I dead
? she had asked herself the first time.
Is this hell?
Janis had prayed with everything she had, prayed that she be delivered from her wraithlike state and be restored to life. She started to panic when she remained paralyzed, but soon the vibrations faded, and cool, familiar sheets had enfolded her legs.

Now, with a little concentration, Janis made herself light. She had learned not to concentrate too hard because doing so would disturb the experience and return her to her body, to her bed. The vibrations came more tightly and quickly. Janis giggled as her feet lifted from the grass. Free from gravity—or whatever passed for gravity here—Janis hovered above the lawn and began to drift its length, weaving around one plant island and then another.