Also by Chris Howard
 
Seaborn  
(Juno Books, 2008)  
NANOWHERE 
 
 
 
 
Chris Howard
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
$
 

NANOWHERE
 
A Lykeion Book
 
Copyright © 2005 by Chris Howard 
All rights reserved.
 
Lykeion Books
P.O. Box 317
Stratham, NH 03885
www.lykeionbooks.com
 
Cataloging-in-Publication Data 
(Provided by Quality Books, Inc.)
 
Howard, Chris, 1963-
       Nanowhere / Chris Howard. 
        p. cm.
        SUMMARY: Alex Shoaler, a geeky skateboarder, loves
     the notorious computer hacker, Kaffia Lang. His feelings
     for Kaffia are used against him by servants of the
     Nanotech visionary, Ernest Straff; pursued by Rost
     Institute death squads, Alex is forced to negotiate the
     release of a mass-murderer from the Institute.
          Audience: Ages 13-18.
          LCCN: 2006901912
          ISBN-13: 978-0-9773807-2-5
          ISBN-10: 0-9773807-2-6
               
   1. Computer hackers--Juvenile fiction.  
2. Skateboarders--Juvenile fiction.  3. Nanotechnology--
Juvenile fiction.  4. Adventure stories.  5. Suspense
fiction.  6. Fantasy fiction.  [1. Computer hackers--
Fiction.  2. Skateboarders--Fiction.  3. Nanotechnology
--Fiction.  4. Fantasy.]    I. Title.
 
 PZ7.H83255Nan 2006                [Fic]
                                             QBI06-600089
 
This is a work of fiction.  Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.  
 
www.lykeionbooks.com/nanowhere

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
# ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
 
Many friends, family, and fellow blogging writers helped proofread and edit this story.  I'd like to thank Dia, Danni, Chloe, Samir Satam, Jeff Hayes, Greg Hall, Deborah Woehr, Lee Pletzers and Jack Slyde for the numerous corrections and comments they gave me; Christopher for the cool symmetric punishment idea, and Alice for doing a really good job of pretending to accept my nocturnal writing habits.
 
 
 

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
NANOWHERE
 
#

 
 
1
Joe and Al
 
 
DR. ERNEST STRAFF wasn’t surprised when the jumptroopers tackled him in his dining room, stuffed his head in a bag, zip-tied his wrists and ankles, dragged him into a clearing in the forest next to his house, and cabled him up into a hovering gunship. He just thought or hoped or wished he had had more time.
     In seven hundred and sixteen seconds—Straff was counting—his captors had him over the New Hampshire line, crossing western Mass at a shallow angle that would take him into upstate New York. He knew their direction because he heard a voice through the backroar of the engines, deep with round tones and a slight Minnesota lilt, curiously pointing out the Mass Pike to one of his squadmates. I-90 ran east-west across Massachusetts, dipped south a bit in the middle before it headed into Boston. The ex-Minnesotan was on Straff’s left, so they must be just north of the Pike, heading west. Nothing but cold Atlantic east. If the pilot kept a fairly straight heading they’d cross into New York south of the capital toward the Catskill’s. 
     Straff caught all of this in the space of a few seconds.  As soon as the trooper started speaking, he stopped, having seen another of his team give him a finger drawn across the throat.     
     This left another few hundred seconds for Dr. Straff to blindly think over his fate. The black fabric bag rubbed his nose and ears. The gunship’s engines threw off a steady high-throttled chainsaw whine with an accompanying fuselage-vibrating rumble, and his ears hurt trying to listen for distinguishable sounds out of the dense storm of noise. 
 
#
 
     The noetic surgeon stepped back from his scope, rubbing the arched pink grooves in the skin around his eyes. “Nicely healed, sir. She’s ready to go.”
     Dr. Greenleigh looked up from the whitepaper his tech staff had worked up for the procedure. He pocketed his reading glasses. “Enough in place to get into her memory flow?”
     “Yes, sir.”
     The mechs embedded in June Trimony’s brain were next-gen neural retiforms, far more intrusive and real-driving than gCognitivs, SoulYoke stabs or the deeper versions of these developed in the military’s labs. 
     “How long before her body rejects them?”
     The surgeon’s lips curled in to hide his mouth behind a stiff doughy line. His lips popped out after a pause. “I’d guess a month.”
     The Chairman of the Rost Institute tilted his head a little, not quite smiling, not much of a guesser. “That long?”
     “Guessing, but keeping it cautious, sir. There are physiologicals to consider, but I’ll stand by a month,” he said, nodding.
     “And after rejection?”
     “They won’t come out easy. Probably kill her.”
     Greenleigh straightened, pausing half a second over the question of how much sympathy he needed to show, and nodded at his surgeon without showing anything that looked sympathetic. “Very well. Keep her on nutrition. I need her healthy.”
     “Yes, Dr. Greenleigh.”
     The chairman studied the surgeon a moment, and then showed all of his teeth in a broad grin. “Well done, Mitch. I’m off to pick up an old friend at the landing. Let me know when Miss Trimony wakes.”
 
#
 
     Kaffia Lang jumped the curb at 30 k’s, ground the handrail against the earth’s gravity in a sideways scoot, and dropped three feet into a concrete plain at the edge of the North Hampton skate park. 
     She swung her backpack around, charcoal black against smooth brown skin and a flare of tight neon green clothing. She lowered it to the ground as she rolled up to another skater, Alexander Shoaler, a tall red head her own age, fifteen. 
     Plywood ramps and half pipes ringed the central concrete basin like bygone-era shipyard scraps. The park was clean, walled with sixty-foot pines, and set back twenty meters off Atlantic Avenue, prime real estate that the owner had been obliged to give up in some cloudy property tax exchange deal with the New Hampshire town. 
     A single lane dirt track ran alongside the laser-leveled concrete pad, weed-choked and pot-holed. It headed into the forest, lost in overgrowth thirty meters beyond the padlocked gate. 
     The forest was haunted. Everyone knew that, but the tax deal apparently included a do-not-bother-the-skaters clause, and so as long as you stayed this side of the gate you weren’t likely to run into any of the rumored specters, alleged oversized arachnids, poisonous fog or any of the other blood-drinking, mind-emptying, acidic-saliva-spitting denizens of the wood.
     Kaffia didn’t notice the haunted forest. She smiled at Alex because she felt their world blaze into existence and expand around them, widening to encompass the real world, but with special properties like the ability to tune out the real world while they were together. When her parents sighed, “Off in your own little world, Kaffia?” she would say, “Actually, it’s quite large, as large as I want it to be.” 
     The private world she shared with Alex always appeared when they met. They’d been friends about a year but it felt like five times that, and they’d taken it so far, that for fun and the delight of annoying others, they pretended to be married. That was the act they usually put on while in their world, a comfortably married couple with loud staged greetings and grotesquely sweet nicknames. It threw everyone around them into uncomfortable amusement or sickness, sometimes both.
     Alex waved off another boarder, turned to Kaffia, puckering up.
     “Lips,” she said shortly in mock reproach, followed his lip-scrunching expression, but turned her head at just the right time so that he planted his kiss on her cheek. 
     “How was your day, dear?” Kaffia asked brightly in the role of the dutiful wife, something she understood, could role-play, but would never be.
     School had let out half an hour ago. The first word that shot into Alex’s mind went right to his mouth. 
     “Blistering.”
     “Shall I fix you a drink?”
     His mouth closed. He raised an eyebrow, pleasantly surprised. “Double, if you can.”
     Anticipating this, Kaffia dug out two gleaming red cans of Coke from her pack and heaved them. Alex caught them like high-entropy-bound raw eggs, popped open both, but drank at a civilized pace, alternating cans while he rolled back and forth on his board. Kaffia rifled through her pack again, pulled out a fat hardcover textbook, and jutted her chin at the Cokes.
     “Girls locker room was out. Had to get some woodshopper to get them for me out of the boys’. It has to be Coke?” She frowned, pausing for an answer, and then rolled her eyes. “And don’t give me some marketing slogan.”
     He gave her a puzzled look, which slid off his face a moment later as if he had slipped out of their world and into another. He drifted in dreamy contentment, savoring the complex natural flavors swirling in an engaging caramel-colored mélange of high fructose corn syrup and/or sucrose. 
     “It’s the spice,” he said slowly, almost in a trance. 
     Arrakis…Dune…Desert planet…
     She looked coldly at his faraway look. Reading it, Alex added, “None of the others have anything like it. There’s a unique flavor found only in genuine Coca-Cola.”
     She gave his cheek a soft slide of her fingers, and then slapped him gently. “Snap out of it.”
     “It’s required if you’re going to fold space.”
     “Right.”
     He sighed, dropped his shoulders, reentering their world by blinking a few times. He shrugged at the obvious. “How else is the emperor going to maintain control over his ten-thousand year old interplanetary feudal hierarchy?” 
     “When you put it like that.” 
     Alex laughed, upended the can in his right hand. “First, the spice. Second, you know I like to burp when I skate.” He tossed her the empties and shot off the ledge, plummeting into the concrete bowl. Kaffia dropped her textbook, caught it between her knees, and juggled the cans for half a second before lobbing them into the trash.
     Alex Shoaler was a wiry skater with hazel eyes that bugged out and shifted color with the changing light. He liked this effect, and made a habit of moving around a lot, which annoyed just about everyone. His mother thought she could cut hair as well as any barber, and so he usually sported a horribly uneven buzz cut (probably not entirely her fault). His dense bristly orangey-red hair looked like someone had smeared his head with marmalade, the kind with extra shredded citrus rind. It always stood on end, even when it grew out, as if he was walking around with his tongue in a powered light socket. His skin was white as a bed sheet, but so freckled that it appeared splotchy brown from a distance.
     Kaffia Lang was nearly his opposite, female, as dark brown as he was light, as pure a shade of color as he was freckled, as poised as he was loose and jumpy. She had shoulder-length wavy bundles of peat-brown hair that she did various things with. Today, she’d gathered two-dozen tiny braids into one thick knot at the base of her neck. 
     To counter his way-too-baggy purple camo shorts (Kaffia snorted: where the hell was he planning to blend in with random leafy patterns of lilac, lavender and violet?), she wore a close-fitting lime green bodysuit, hoop earrings, and cycling gloves with the fingers cut out. 
     Everyone made fun of her name, not to her face—a hundred variations on coffee, cafe latte, coffeepot, Columbian Supremo, French Roast, iced coffee, decaf, half-caf, espresso, expresso. 
     Alex called her Joe.
     Kaffia sat at the edge of the skate bowl, face in her schoolwork, ignoring the laughing of the other skaters, the occasional grunt and scream of someone eating it, and then more laughing. She joined the other skaters in glaring suspiciously up at the roar of some military aircraft that cruised overhead, right above the treetops. The second to go over in the last five minutes.
     She managed to finish her trig homework, read a chapter on the early battles of the First American Civil War, and re-lace her skates, all before looking up to find the sky had turned pale and the few skaters and lurkers had all gone home. Alex was still hopping embankments and rolling around in zigzags and sudden rotates like a marble in a wobbling bowl. That’s how he did his thinking.
     She put everything away and stood, stretching her arms as she rolled forward. The sun hadn’t yet set, but was at that dim undecided point where it tried to linger at the door, fingers clutching at the frame, before night shoved it into the hall and locked it outside until morning. 
     Kaffia glanced at the sky through the trees and smiled to herself at the thought that Alex wouldn’t call this night yet. 
     She braked hard at the bowl’s rim. She heard the dull tap of wheels on pavement and someone chuckling. Kaffia and Alex weren’t alone anymore, and although the newcomers were smiling, there was nothing friendly about them.

 
 
 
2
Doctor Death
 
 
LIKE A HARE on a quick trip to a predator’s nest, Dr. Ernest Straff felt one of his captors’ fingers digging talon-like into his shoulder, shifting every few minutes to regrip, pinning him to his seat. 
     Straff fought back the urge to wrench up his lunch. 
     They’d caught him so easily, went through his property defenses like a cutting rain sheered the load-bearing threads of a spider’s web. Caught on his way to the kitchen for a cup of decaf. 
     “Damnation!” The word burst from his lips like overpressure from a release valve, puffing out the black bag covering his head. So so easily. 
     “Prepared for…” He gasped something unintelligible. His head jerked forward. His voice sputtered into silence. 
     He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, the heated gasses from his lungs swirling around the bag’s insides, eddying over his cheeks, against his teeth. 
     “Against everything…” 
     He couldn’t hear his own voice over the noise from the engines, just the breath passing his teeth, his tongue ticking against the top of his mouth as he formed the words. 
     “Ground forces with artillery…self-organizing aerosol networks with toxic payloads.” Intuition had always guided him toward the infinitesimally small, some sort of nanodevice, his own creations used against him.
     Before they’d dragged the hood over his head, he had glimpsed four geared-up troopers in black and gray, masked and bristling communication and sense facilities. They’d dropped through his forest canopy defense as if they could see through it, which shouldn’t have been possible.
     He squeezed his eyes closed and shook his head. The rough bag scraped his cheeks. 
     “Where were Walter and Wesley,” he snapped in a hot disappointed whisper. “When these…when these assholes ripped off the front door of my house?”  
     He twisted his lips in, puckering and chewing in fury. Can’t blame them. They’d gone off to the north end to inspect an intrusion. I told them it’s just kids on roller skates who’d worked their way around to the back of the property, having been stung a few times trying the front road. 
     And then four soldiers stormed his house and mashed him into the floor of his own dining room. The north end intruders were a diversion. They’d known how to get him without much trouble. And then he was in the air and out of state.
     He had thought the airspace over his property sufficiently protected by a clever bit of mimicry he’d developed to throw off high-res satellite imagery. Apparently not.
     On the other hand, this was not that far from how he’d expected to be caught. Straff’s eyes shot open and swung around the black bag. He sucked his fury inside to simmer, and after a few hundred more seconds, his face relaxed. There had always been the hope for more time, and perhaps a well-deserved but dramatic end to his life, like something out of an old Frankenstein movie, besieged by a mob of locals with pitchforks, scythes, torches and Kalashnikov’s—when they discovered who’d been hiding out in their town all this time. 
     He wasn’t terribly shocked that a team of highly equipped illegitimates had discovered him. These weren’t soldiers from the restored government. They wouldn’t have sent soldiers. He’d have received some sort of court summons and it would have been from guys in gray suits with briefcases instead of black and gray camo and assault-o-matics.  
     He tilted his head a little to catch a faint conversation, but he couldn’t make out the words over the noise. 
     These were Greenleigh’s people, or some mid-level ex-SAC Board commander who still had access to the old deathsquads and mobile military hardware. Zoerner was gone, dead for three years. But even after a tyrant is removed from power, it takes a long time to uproot all the evil planted during his reign.
     Dr. Straff continued counting absently while his thoughts played with escape scenarios. One in particular. He had anticipated something, even if it wasn’t exactly this, and he had…sort of planned for it, but it would take a week to play out, a week before he’d know if he’d live or die.  
     Until then, he’d count.
     He had been hiding for as many days as seconds that had passed. He hadn’t shut himself off from the world, but the world from him. He diligently read the blogs and  newsfeeds. The Net was rife with Straff sightings and inside stories of his escape from justice. They placed him in secret Montana bunkers, masterminding worldwide extermination. They blamed him for natural disasters and species deaths, everything from producing destructive hurricanes to causing declines in penguin populations.  
     He was the nanotech god after all. He could have changed his appearance, his fingerprints, “his DNA”—as some of the tabloids put it. He could be among us, selling your kids candy, mowing your lawn, playing for the Oakland A’s.
     Straff snorted at the thought. (He was a Red Sox fan from way back). He also knew who was still out there. He knew exactly who he was hiding from. The really dangerous ones, not the public. All the public would do was kill him speedily. Most would anyway. There were a few million odd vengeful people who’d kill him slowly and feed his remains to scavenging animals, but these were the more assertive members of the public, and he didn’t know their names.  
     Others he knew well, and in the past had been pressed into service by them. They had deceived him, and he’d let himself be deceived. He had done horrible things for them. Millions died because of what they made him do. President Zoerner, the head of the Purists had gone to his death, but the rest of his regime, without the head, remained intact: the shoulders, the neck, the lower parts of the brainstem. Straff knew very well who would want him alive--the nastier parts.  
     Straff’s stomach rammed into the roof of his mouth.  The gunship dropped from the sky, braked a meter off the pad and then landed like a few tons of hot armor-plated machinery on concrete. A heavy door rolled open. One of the soldiers snipped the ties, ripped the rough fabric hood from his head, tearing away a few irreplaceable strands of gray hair with it, and shoved Straff into the twilight.
     Straff’s body was bent as if he carried the accumulated weight of the corpses he’d produced, millions of them by most estimates—and that wasn’t counting the ciphers, which was a Rost Institute specific project that took the toll into tens of millions. 
     He kept the guilt at bay by keeping his mind busy. He had to keep his thoughts in motion just to remain conscious, doing things like count the seconds since they’d caught him. The burden of guilt stooped his shoulders, buckled his spine and would crush him flat if he allowed it out of his periphery and into focus.
     He staggered a little, rubbing his wrists, straightened up as much as he could, and walked away from the gunship between four of the troopers who’d captured him. They towered over him, a moving wall of gray camo rippling over muscles, escorting him up the walk.  
     Dr. Straff looked exactly as he had always looked. He was a short stocky sixty year old, nearly bald, with a plump nose and fuzzy white eyebrows. He looked as if he should be wearing glasses but he wasn’t. In his wrinkled blue labcoat he could have been an elderly small-town GP from some past era, back when worried mothers rushed their kids to the family doctor for sprained ankles, chickenpox and temps over a hundred, and the doctor fixed everything with gentle concern, handing out lollipops afterward.
     That image of the charming family doctor had been purged from the culture by Ernest Straff. He had killed the medical profession. If not directly, it had all been done in his name. 
     Straff was the reason people hated hospitals. It was his fault that at the sight of any doctor, people ran for their lives, or shrank in fear with murmurs of, “Don’t make eye contact.” 
     When manufactured viruses swept through cities, and riots broke out, Straff’s advanced medical agency stepped aside and let it happen. When Americans thought of Dr. Ernest Straff, they thought of bodies stacked next to dumpsters in alleyways, EKG alarms blaring from crowded hospital rooms, technicians draining corpses into blood-type bags and selling them off to high-bidders. They couldn’t shut their eyes against the palsied hands of an intoxicated surgeon demanding clamps, rails and the bone saw, they couldn’t turn away from floodlit operating rooms that smelled like sewers, damp with death. 
     Ernest Straff didn’t bother looking around at the cluster of buildings that made up the Rost Institute. He knew where he was. Why the hood then? Why the silence? He glowered at the nearest jumptrooper. 
     “You think I’d misplace upstate New York?”
     The trooper ignored him, although the man was so geared up it was difficult to tell.
     Two thousand four hundred and seventeen seconds since two hundred pounds of trooper landed on him, grinding his face into the dining room rug and shattering his favorite coffee mug.
     Straff stopped when he recognized the man coming at him, but the trooper behind him shoved him a few steps further.
     Dr. Richard Greenleigh met him outside Building Blue, a twelve-story block of pitted concrete with rows of identical window slits and blue front doors. There was an eight-meter deep crater where Building Orange once stood. That was Straff’s doing as well.
     Straff met Greenleigh’s dark deep-set eyes and stayed there, glaring for a few seconds, until Greenleigh opened his mouth into a wide smile of perfect white teeth and aimed them at him like a weapons array. 
     Greenleigh was a pale rickety man in a faithful black suit, meticulously unwrinkled and clean, perfectly barbered and manicured. Like a leaky septic tank beneath soft green meadow folds, an unhealthy cleanliness seeped from his pores and gave off a weird sweet smell, a corrupt bundling of a pharmaceutical researcher and an undertaker.
     “Caught up with you at last, Dr. Straff,” said Greenleigh, pleasant, dignified and slow, a tone that made it clear that there was no reason to be angry. He waved off the jumptroopers.  
     “How?” Straff’s voice was raspy and defensive.
     “Fairly easily, I’m afraid. Some sort of watchdog process monitors sat image data for manipulation,” said Greenleigh in an I-expected-a-little-bit-more-from-you tone. “It happens. High level covering up, that sort of thing. When the process flagged a half kilometer sized patch of forest in coastal New Hampshire, no one thought much of it. When it flagged it after a second pass, with the same manip signature, that’s when they got excited. When this piece of forest identically matched a like sized piece 1.2 klicks away, it got my attention. The idiots in data security have spent the last seventy-two hours trying to figure out how someone manip’d the same data twice, right under their noses. While I understood the anomaly at once. The data hadn’t changed. The forest had. And there’s only one man on earth with the power to control nature on this scale and to that level of detail. I knew I had you.”
     Straff dropped his eyes to the sidewalk, his breathing quickening.
     “Come on, Ernest. It’ll be like old times. I have one of your old acquaintances over in Red. Time for a reunion, I think.. Even let her out of her cage, and had her fixed up for you.”
     Straff’s head snapped up. “Who?” 
     “The moment I knew my team had you, I sent for June Trimony.”
     “Trimony?” Straff whispered, a little confused. He had to remind himself that he was no longer on Greenleigh’s side. Trimony had always been an enemy, hacking into Rost systems, the leader of her own intel-gathering org, with her own agents in the field feeding her data. “I thought she died in the overthrow.”
     “You’re not the only one with secrets, Ernest.” Greenleigh smiled. “Let’s go inside and talk.” The chairman of Rost Institute indicated the building behind him with a precise sweep of his hand. “I used to call you Ernest. Do you mind?” He paused for an answer, and then shrugged. “Or would you prefer one of the names the public has pinned to you?”
     Ernest Straff forgot to count. His lungs betrayed him. He coughed and tried to catch his breath, stuttering numbers in the thousands. Dr. Greenleigh’s thin, gentle laugh hit him and followed him to his knees.

 
3
A Little Poetry
 
 
THREE JUNIOR-GRADE LYCEUM students stood at the edge of the North Hampton skate park, their eyes fixed on the unexpectedly delightful sight. 
     Alex looked up from the bottom of the bowl, frowning. He recognized them.
     “Someone’s let the children out at night,” giggled Zane Jeffins creepily. 
     “No chaperons?” Drew Waldren’s face lit up with all the glee of a bully about to tug the wings off insects. She swung her tiny purse around so that she could pull something metallic from it.
     “And with the haunted forest so close,” said the oldest of the three, Randal Revard, in distaste. “Really,” he continued as if emerging from a long, speechless disbelief. “Your parents ought to be beaten senseless for negligence.” He huffed. “Two innocent children left all alone after sunset, in a cruel world. Have they learned nothing from the Purists?”
     “Shoaler doesn’t got a father,” put in the other one, Zane.
     “Twice the punishment’s in order then.”
     “Nighty night, Shoaler.”
     Alex wondered why they hadn’t mentioned Kaffia. She was better known than he’d ever been. Probably the NDIS myth working on their fears. (Everyone said Kaffia was June Trimony reborn. So, killing her might not work. For all they knew she’d already hacked that whole transmigration of the soul thing, and could come back to get them).
     They were all a year or two older, not much taller since both Alex and Kaffia had height, not smarter since Alex and Kaffia also had brains, but slyer, more manipulative and endowed with little in the way of discretion. Sociopathic? No, too clinical. The word “dastardly” came to Alex’s mind, a good old-fashioned concept that needed reviving because there seemed to be so much dastardliness going on these days. 
     Kaffia and Alex weren’t naive. There were two problems that had to be faced here. They understood the nasty side of teenage inter-group warfare. They just didn’t have much practical experience. They didn’t really belong to a group, and had always slipped under the radar (as well as other means of discovery and tracking: GPS/LBA plants, IR tagging, cell-signal triangulation and mini-cams). They knew some of these brawls involved zip-ties, barber’s shears for “scalping” and involuntary piercing. Nothing lethal. The goal was disfiguration, proof that the fracas had gone down and you’d emerged victorious. No one was supposed to die, or even get to within an inch of their lives. A few inches, a hand’s width, half a foot, were all within the guidelines though. 
     That was the other problem. Not everyone stuck to the guidelines. Sometimes these things left you broken, and the last thing you wanted to do when you got hurt, snapped a bone, or severed a major artery was go to one of the public hospitals (Affectionately: CD&Cs—Centers for Disease and Control), where you were just as likely to live as die, and that was if you somehow, against the odds, picked winning numbers in the wait-I’m-not-here-for-surgery/wrong-limb-amputated lottery. 
     “It’s actually not night yet,” said Alex seriously, looking skyward, rubbing his chin.
     “What?” snapped the Drew as if she only had three operating modes and did a round robin through them: silent, zealously cheerful and defensive—so, silent must be next.
     “You said night, but we’ll have to wait until the refracted sun passes below the sea-level tangent plane.”
     The three newcomers stared at him stupidly. Kaffia started to grin.
     “…for night to be officially here,” added Alex, nodding.
     Damn, that’s why she liked Alex. Because he could think to say something like that when faced with something like this. 
     Zane giggled irritatingly, thinking that this must be some kind of joke, which it was. Zane, the only one with skates—inlines Alex noted with an eyebrow raised—was a buck-toothed sixteen-year-old with a skinny head and huge perpendicularly planted ears. He had long straight blond hair that fell in flat sheets down the sides of his head like a cowl, with lateral slits for his auditory appendages. A skinny white cigarette dangled from his skinny white lips. 
     Randal was the quiet evil one in the group, the mastermind, a stooped monastic fellow with wire-rim glasses that magnified his blue unblinking eyes and gave him a reptilian look. He had greasy brown hair that fell evenly about his skull as if he’d just stepped in from a downpour without an umbrella. He had pale skin, apishly long arms and cold skinny fingers that plucked and pinched and looked like they wanted to play with various sharp dental instruments, but for all the wrong reasons.
     Drew Waldren didn’t seem to fit with these two. She didn’t seem weird at all. She was actually pretty, with fashionably cut black hair, modest make-up, disfigured a little by her attitude. Her pointy chin stuck out and she ratcheted her long narrow nose into the air because everything around her reeked of stupidity and weakness. Her eyes were dead, blunt stones that revealed that there wasn’t much going on behind them—although she considered it a hive of activity. Her ears were heavy with metal and synthetic gems tracing a nautilus-like spiral from lobe to the little flap over the canal. 
     Randal pulled out a tiny aerosolic, a gleaming black handheld cylinder, some kind of robbery deterrent device filled with one of the pepper spray variants, although, knowing Randal, it held something more permanent and painful. Something that might even require a trip to the CD&C, where you can imagine that instead of just washing out your eyes with a slippery sterile fluid, they’d jump right to a procedure that had the word “harvest” in it.
     Drew fingered the insides of her nearly uselessly small leather purse and tugged out an ear-piercing gun with a clip of ready rivet charges. (They went on with a snap but you had to cut them off).
     Zane grinned, giggled a little, puffed on his cigarette, pulled up his fists, and skated forward leisurely, a cat let loose on two trapped mice.
     Randal attacked first. He lunged at Kaffia, his fist out, thumb jabbing the activator. Alex kicked off at the same time, shot vertical and jumped the lip in time to cross paths with the spray. 
     It stung like a swarm of stabbing wasps and molten lead rolling along his eyelids. He flew from his board, landed flat on the concrete, smacking his skull with a flash of white across his retinas. 
     Beside him Kaffia shouted something abusive, struggling blindly as Zane circled her like a hyena, darting in with quick hammering blows of his bony fists, and giggling at Kaffia’s delayed and ineffective defense. 
     Randal laughed, arms folded, his weapon put away. He watched while his partners moved in to finish the job. Drew roamed around the scuffle in a higher orbit, her fingers nervously clicking the piercing gun’s trigger.
     Alex shifted on his side, shoved away his board, which had come rolling back to him like a sympathetic dog—It was a highend board. 
     Blindly, fingertips digging into concrete, he launched his tall gangly body in the direction of Zane’s goofy laughing. He went down on top of someone. 
     They hit the concrete together, and by the soft brush of thin straight hair against his face, a choked off giggle and the oily residue of weird cigarettes smelling of pine resin, Alex knew he had aimed true. 
     Kaffia immediately understood what Alex was up to. She didn’t need her eyes. She dropped toward their grunts and sounds of struggling, grabbed Zane by the shoulder to get her bearings and attacked him savagely. 
     The stitching in her glove grazed Alex’s cheek as she stabbed stiffened fingers into Zane, leaving divots of subcutaneous bleeding in the soft spaces between his collarbone and throat. All three of them, Alex, Kaffia and Zane went still. Kaffia swung away toward clicking noises from the piercing gun.
     “Drew!” Kaffia screamed blindly, her fingers now digging into Zane’s throat. “You come near me with that and I’ll take his larynx home as a trophy!”
     Alex scowled, dripping tears from the chemical assault on his eyes. Zane groaned underneath him. Kaffia dug her nails deeper into Zane’s soft neck skin with one hand, halving his air supply. The other, she tightened into a fist. Drew stopped moving and held the piercer quiet in her hands.
     “What have we here?” Randal sang the words in mock surprise. “Poetry, Shoaler? You write poetry?” 
     He had dumped out Alex’s pack during the scuffle and was picking through the things that looked interesting. The first to catch his eye was Alex’s black, scarred leather-bound journal with rubberbands to keep it closed and hold in loose paper.
     “You’re a bigger fairy than I thought you were.” He flipped through half a dozen pages. “And sloppy too. No title for this one.” 
     It wasn’t written on the page but Randal couldn’t help himself: “Untitled poem by Alexander Shoaler.” 
     He cleared his throat solemnly. 
     “She sees the roses grow, the winds blow the petals in the dust, and she reaches through the spaces in the fence and takes just one red bloom to keep in her trust.”
     Alex felt a hot stab of pain shoot through his body as if someone had crotch-kicked him and left him writhing on the ground. His lungs choked closed. He felt trapped. His tongue went dry and his racing heart ricocheted around his ribcage, thumping and banging and echoing like a bucketful of hammers tipped into a ventilation shaft. 
     He clutched the concrete so tight with his left hand his fingers bled. “You’re reading it wrong…Those aren’t…I’m not done!” He snapped defensively but bit off his complaint, not because Randal kept going, chuckling in between lines, but because Alex felt Kaffia’s warm hand on his arm.
     “She hears a bright voice, a truer choice whispers of skies of false blue, but she sees with her own clear eyes instead of someone else’s to look through.”
     Drew cut off any more by being the first to clap, the slow mocking rhythm of a near-deserted theater. Randal tucked the journal under his arm and joined her, adding dissonance. Fixed to the earth by Kaffia and Alex, Zane couldn’t do much more than sob.
     “That was terrible, Shoaler. You’ll just have to do it over,” said Randal as he flung the journal open and ripped the page from the binding. 
     There were two sounds in the world. A soft rustle through the trees of the forest and the crackling sound of a page from Alex’s notebook twisting and falling through open air to the ground.
     Alex levered himself up by putting his full weight on Zane. He staggered blindly in Randal’s direction, his eyes pinned closed by the aerosolic’s chemical burn. 
     “Stop!”
     Randal sidestepped him, chuckling. 
     “What’s this?” He flipped through more pages. “How much of this shit have you written Shoaler?” 
     Skipping sideways, Randal dodged another of Alex’s blind lunges. “One about teachers, one about your hacker friend, something about the ocean, the abyss, you really like the ocean, some scribbling.” He tore more pages out and tossed them into the air with a flourish. “Garbage, Shoaler, garbage.” More tearing paper and the dead-leaf rustle of wrinkled pages on concrete.
     Something soft brushed by Alex, like a gust off the Atlantic. He spun, reaching out but caught air.
     “Wha—!” Randal choked on the word, couldn’t get it swallowed, and made gurgling noises as if the W was wedged in his throat, pointy ends poking spongy tissue and kicking phlegm production into high gear. 
     Alex heard his journal hit the concrete with a slap.
     Drew Waldren screamed—a real horror movie wail. 
     Little hairs standing on end, Kaffia pushed Zane down harder and spun around in Drew’s direction. Zane wriggled and whimpered like a dog threatened with a bath. His body twitched, and the heels of his skates hammered on the concrete as if he were being electrocuted.  
     “G—get away from me!” Drew screamed.
     Alex froze, trying to listen for any clue to identify the newer-comers. He hadn’t heard anyone approach. He swung around.
     “Joe?”
     Kaffia didn’t answer. What was that wet crunch? A bone breaking? Each hair on his head, already standing on end, tugged at its follicle, stiffened and shivered like a guitar string.
     “Noooooo!” Randal shrieked like a girl.
     Kaffia squeezed out more tears and released Zane, millions of thoughts firing through her mind, sparks racing synapse gaps, huge structures of thought took form, rose to the surface, came into focus where she continued building on them, or in a microseconds’ decision discarded them. A spasm shook her body as she reached forward and then froze. 
     Should she take off her skates? Leave them on. If she could get to the road she could outskate anyone. On any other surface they would catch her. 
     Her thoughts came in split second bursts. Who? I’m blind! Where’s Alex? 
     She didn’t hear him. Whoever it was, wasn’t attacking him. Yet. She heard the sound of paper crinkling…paper crinkling and screaming. 
     Kaffia got to her feet and rolled in what she thought might be Alex’s direction. She wasn’t going anywhere without him.
     All three of them, Randal, Drew and Zane, were crying now, a frightening mix of screeching tires and a nestful of distressed sparrows. Stuttering slapping footsteps and Randal and Drew made it to Atlantic Avenue, Zane just behind them, a little wobbly, kicking the concrete and gaining speed. 
     Their screaming continued for a minute, fading as they ran, cut now and then by each of them when they caught their breaths so they could scream some more.

 
 
 
4
NDIS
 
 
WHEN I SAW KAFFIA LANG for the first time she was wearing a black t-shirt with five numbers, 31337, in sloppy yellow handwriting eight inches high between her shoulder blades. She walked through the halls of North Hampton Lyceum as if they were hers. Like she was alone. She didn’t seem to notice the darting eyes of fear in front of her, the resentment and relief in her wake, the breath-releasing relief of antelope not being singled out by a predator. As soon as she passed by and all was safe again, they hated her. 
     I wondered then if she knew the effect she had on the people around her. She didn’t appear to. She never looked back. And everyone got out of her way. She always seemed to know where she was going, while everyone else seemed to mill around without guidance.
     I knew where I was going. My next class was this way, and she happened to be going the same direction. Yeah. 
     I really looked at her, carefully at first, a few seconds at a time, but then hard and focused, until the rest of NHL blurred around me.  
     I’d only heard rumors of the hacker, Kaffia, but here she was, not far in front of me, her dark hair unraveled into something like dreadlocks—if you went to a salon and paid them hundreds of dollars to do that sort of thing. You know, dreadlockish, but really expensive, sort of a rasta-rodéo-drive thing. 
     Her hair swung with her stride. Everything else about her was measured, perfect, tight. Her black t-shirt and faded jeans were especially tight. Her walk, perfect, not too quick, not too slow. She was going somewhere with a purpose. Her fists—tight. Wherever she was going, it looked like she’d be ready for anything, coding to combat.
     I followed her through the hall, over the quad, a ways behind her, watching the number seesaw on her back as she walked. I had my board, but couldn’t use it on the grounds. I’d already been warned, if the wheels touched the cement it would be confiscated. Didn’t really matter. She wasn’t going to get away from me.
     Thirty-one thousand, three hundred and thirty-seven whats? 
     Why would anyone put that in yellow letters on a shirt? What could it mean? I dug around in my pack, ran into a girl walking the other way, said I was sorry, and picked up my pace so that I could keep up with Kaffia. I keyed 31337 into my calculator and pressed the SQRT button. I shook my head at, 
 
     177.02259742756007815542435965881
 
     31337. Number of times she…did what? Number of seconds. Her game highscore? Any patterns? I divided it by 60. By 24. Everything I did to it looked meaningless.
     “Shoaler!”
     Kyle Vickery, a Junior classman and first-rate thug, came at me from the right. He grabbed my pack and swung me in a circle. I held my board but lost my footing. I’m pretty tall and at least average weight, probably above average, but Vickery’s huge, not fat, but thick and muscled and planted to the ground. He’s not fast—I’ve outrun him twice since I got to the Lyceum a month ago—but I probably couldn’t knock him over with a running start. I’ll have to try that one of these days.
     “Alex. Alex Shoaler. You’re always running away.”
     Something thumped against my chest. I blinked uncertainly. The next thing I could focus on was the sky.  I remember thinking, hey, the sun’s about a 100 degrees along its arc.
     “You in a hurry?”
     Kyle’s big head, which looked like a squared off block of wood silhouetted against the sun and sky, hovered over me. He had blond hair, flat-topped and shaved on the sides and back, so that from my angle he looked like he had a bleached foot and half of telephone pole sticking out of his shoulders where his head and neck should be. He had a tiny knot of a nose for such a big guy, and narrowly set blue eyes.
     “He’s running after her,” one of Vickery’s friends put in, jutting his chin in Kaffia’s direction.
     I was new to the Lyceum, but I’m not a first year,  a seventh-grader. NHL covers grades seven through twelve. I’m fourteen, and started here as a ninth-grader, a prep. My mom got me a tutor and made me do dawn-to-dusk summer school so I could get in without repeating a grade.
     Vickery and his friends didn’t usually assault students above the first year, but I was also new, and that made me a target. 
     There must be something very gratifying about singling out people unfamiliar with an area and making it as hard as possible for them to get where they need to go. (These were the people who grew up to plan downtown city streets across America, one-way kind of people).
     “You stalking NDIS?”
     I shook my head. That would be stupid. Kyle was half-grinning, but I noticed he’d whispered the question, just loud enough for me and him and maybe a couple of his friends to hear.
     That told me all I needed to know. And gave me a real reason to get to know her. (The number on her shirt was just a distraction, curiosity really). Even Vickery didn’t want to upset Kaffia, didn’t want it known that he’d used her hacker name—“endiss”—no one seemed to know what it stood for or meant.
     “Stupid, man.” Others around Vickery nodded vigorously. “Pure stupidity. NDIS’ll rip you apart.”
     Strange how hatred and fear always seem to go together. They all hated her…because they feared her. 
     I’ve heard the rumors about her. I’ve even heard about the few bold idiots who threatened her in public. Nothing happened to some of them. Maybe they weren’t worthy of revenge? Others who attacked her probably got what they deserved—sometimes through their parents. Nothing you could tie back to NDIS, but, you know, sometimes credit bureaus make mistakes, so does the IRS, and aren’t there a dozen places in the workflows of a bunch of other government agencies and companies that can be exploited—and used against someone?      
     I decided right then—flat on my back with Vickery glaring down at me—to find out what her hacker name meant. That seemed the likeliest way to get to know her, and anyone who knew her seemed to be under her protection. She was a core of hacking activity at North Hampton Lyceum. They said she didn’t have any friends, but weird greasy-haired, malnourished preps flocked to her, feeding her information. She was a ninth-grader, a prep, but upper and senior graders offered their data, served her double espressos and communicated in some unrecognizable digital doggerel.  
     Kaffia was on her way to becoming the next Trimony, the legendary hacker who’d died fighting the dictator, Zoerner. If Jon Andreden had led the public crusade, June Trimony had been the core of the underground movement against the murderer in the White House. 
     They said Kaffia’d formed her own organization patterned on Trimony’s. They said she’d cracked government spec’d crypto without brute forcing it. They said she’d broken into servers at the top Fed agencies and left backdoors in all of them. She’d changed conference room door codes at Langley, shutdown SAC Board inquiries, turned on the sprinklers at midnight at Fort Meade—in the middle of January. 
     They said a lot of things. And they didn’t call her Kaffia, or even Miss Lang. They all called her NDIS. That’s her name in their world. (Okay, I was interested in her.  She has this whole exciting world she’s created. It sounded like something I wanted to be in. I asked questions. Doesn’t make me a stalker.)
     Vickery had one of his 3/4 inch dowel fingers poking me in the chest. “What class you going to next, Alexander?”
     Great. “I’m late now.” No use getting angry, but I could feel myself getting angry anyway. “Let me up!”      
     “Soon as you tell me where you’re headed.”
     “Archery.” I coughed the word out.
     The world went silent for half a second. And then they all laughed.
     “Archery’s for girls, Shoaler!” Vickery said girls with extra r’s and a z on the end, girrrlz.  
     He got to his feet and let me up.  Apparently it was so pathetic that I was playing with “ribbons and bows and arrows” that it became an inefficient use of their thugging time. They wandered off, stumbling because they were laughing so hard, looking for a better victim, one with a more pressing situation. 
     Of course, when I got to my feet and looked around, Kaffia was gone.

     
     
 
 
5
Perfect Ghosts
 
 
 “WHO’S THERE?” Alex whispered, but with an edge so choppy and panicked, that he might as well have yelled it. His head swiveled side to side. Tears swung away from his clenched eyes.
     “Who are you?”
     Silent and cautious, Kaffia inched forward, waving her hands in front of her. At the same time both of them felt a soft brush across their eyes, soft and bristly at the same time, as if someone—a stray Mardi Gras partier or rogue Vegas dancer—had swept each of their faces with a feather boa. 
     They jumped, blinked and could see. The chemical burn vanished, leaving a saline pool in the corners of their eyes, that both of them wiped away at the same time.
     Kaffia gasped. Her body stopped. Her skates slid forward out from under her and she landed hard on the concrete. 
     Alex couldn’t move. He stood, half hunched over, still as stone except for his fingers, which trembled with a readiness to shoot out and grab something. He couldn’t move because one of them had his writing journal, flipping through the pages, tugging on them, not really reading them—more like an appraisal of the binding.
     Two ghostly figures stood over Al and Joe, at least seven feet in the air.  It was difficult to tell how tall they were because neither of them touched the ground. They hovered, semi-transparent human forms in long gowns without any feet sticking out from the hem. Both shapes were identical, pale balding men with round ears and large lobes. Their faces were gaunt, not a ghoulish mask of rot, but like an ancient scholar’s, to whom meals and most other tasks were distractions from some obsessive search for truth. Their hands were bony, not monster’s claws, but in keeping with the withered scholar look.
     Alex caught a fine satiny ribbon of light spider over the back of one hand as it stirred over the pages of his journal, a pale refractive tracing of veins heavy with blood. 
     They both noticed it. As each ghost moved, Kaffia and Alex caught hairline stripes of rainbow hues zip along folds in their gowns, along a hard jawline, fanning over the bald dome of a head, outlining a thin pair of lips. They were like moveable glassine human shapes, solid but see-through at the same time, tracing-paper twins.
     Alex scowled, shifting his head a little to the right in a motion that Kaffia recognized as a commitment to get to the bottom of something that puzzled him. They looked familiar, and there was something weird about the way the one was holding his book. It was perfectly still, absolutely motionless. The other one bent down and picked a black pen out of the pile of contents from Alex’s pack, handing it to his twin.
     Alex’s jaw went slack. His mouth sagged slowly open. His head twirled back and forth as he searched the ground for the pages Randal had torn from the book. Kaffia got to her feet warily, keeping an eye on the transparent men in gowns.
     “They—they repaired my writing journal,” whispered Alex.
     Kaffia jerked her head at Alex and then back at…them.     
     You couldn’t find two more realistic, down-to-earth people than Al and Joe, and so, it was with healthy skepticism, some hair standing on end, readiness to debate, intense scowling, what else?
     “Trepidation?” Kaffia ventured.
     “Yeah, I’m feeling it too,” said Alex.
     …and trepidation they approached the seven foot tall see-through human forms. Others would have come right out with “ghost” but Al and Joe had seen too many movies, read too many books, played too many RPGs to jump on that without thinking it through. Ghost? How prosaic.
     “But what else could they be?” Alex whispered in between chewing his bottom lip and leaning his head a little toward Kaffia. He kept his eyes fixed on the nearest transparent shape.
     “They frightened off Randal and his friends. They’re flipping through your book like they understand what it’s for. We could ask them.”
     Alex’s eyes widened, then darted to Kaffia. She’s brilliant. 
     “Yes,” he breathed as if not wanting to inadvertently trigger some defense mechanism in a pack of growling dogs. “Human form usually means sentience.” He nodded, convincing himself. “Maybe they can speak.” 
     Kaffia rolled her eyes.
     Alex cleared his throat, straightened his spine and took one firm formal step forward. “Excuse me, uh, sirs.” He bowed a little and his eyes shifted between the two human shapes. “Please do not take offense at our ignorance of your kind and ways. We have never had the benefit of meeting beings such as yourselves, and…uh…and humbly ask of what service my companion and I may be to such two fine gentleman?” 
     Kaffia did that downward pull with her mouth that showed that she was mildly impressed. That’s why she liked Al. You would cringe at what he might say when meeting finer members of society (or smartly dressed ghosts) and be surprised when he didn’t start with, “Yo!”
     The two ghosts looked up from the book and at each other, but said nothing.  
     “Something’s happening,” whispered Alex. 
     They looked as if they were communicating with facial expressions or through some other quiet means. The one with Alex’s journal flipped through the pages to the last and pulled up the pen he’d taken from his counterpart. Then both of them dropped down to Alex and Kaffia’s height, startling them. 
     Kaffia kicked back a few feet. Alex’s nails dug into his palms. 
     The hint of recognition he’d felt a minute ago surfaced again, clearer this time. He nodded. “Joe, they remind me of Mr. Knopf,” Alex whispered, glancing over at Kaffia.
     She rolled forward again, angling her path to stop right next to Alex. She tilted her head back, studying them. The two ghosts reminded them of their literature teacher at the Lyceum, a long-winded pedant from the Land of Poets and Philosophers who couldn’t let a day go by without quoting Goethe. (If you didn’t pronounce Goethe something like “Gurta,” Herr Knopf would lapse entirely into German and shout at you).
     “But Knopf’s short. These two…” She didn’t finish because the one with the pen started writing.
     The ghost flipped Alex’s journal around with precision, holding it upside down, facing out and flat along the inside of his left arm like a parent would with a picture book. 
     Again, Alex noticed something odd that he couldn’t quite categorize. The ghost’s movements were perfect, too exact (if there could be such a thing—or maybe Alex’s idea of ghost, something half in this world, half in the next, contained an inherent sloppiness. If there were ghosts in this world then someone—whoever monitored death’s door—wasn’t pulling his weight, and was turning out slipshod work. But what he had seen in the last two hundred seconds convinced him that these two were firmly in this world and therefore couldn’t be ghosts). 
     One held his journal absolutely still and with incredible speed wrote perfect letters in a sans serif that made a mechanical engineer’s precise handwriting look like a preschooler’s scribbling.
 
     We are indeed looking for help, and we accept your offer of service. Our master has been compulsorily taken from his home by soldiers we suspect were once operatives for the SACB.
     
     “S.A…What?” Alex frowned absently, thinking, did I say service?
     “Subversive Activities Control Board.” Kaffia smirked at the ghost.
     Alex snapped out of his thoughts and rubbed his head, digging his fingers through his hair. “Right. Thinking…something else.”
     Kaffia put a hand on her hip, pinching one side of her mouth contemptuously. “The SAC Board’s gone. It was one of the first things the legit gov did.”
     The ghost swept his fingers over the page and the ink vanished.
 
     True. They convicted Chairman Sabanin, but very few of the soldiers operating in the organization were ever brought to trial.  Many participated in the atrocities at the Rost Institute. Recent kidnappings and killings tend to favor the hypothesis that some of these soldiers have remained active, and have carried out operations planned by Rost researchers and former SACB commanders.
     Our master has been in hiding for three years, unwilling to release his work because he feared it would be misused.
 
     “What’s he working on, some kind of military stuff?” Alex asked, eyebrows going up.
     Kaffia grabbed his arm.  Wait. A higher level. “Who’s your master?”
 
     Defensive molecular engineering research for the most part, which could be adopted for any number of uses, certainly by the military. His name is Dr. Ernest Straff.
 
     Alex flinched, backing up a step, the name itself like a contagion.
     “Doctor Death.” Kaffia sniffed with an I-should’ve-known expression. She shook her head and twisted her lips contemptuously. Two ghosts stop and ask you for help, you just know it’s not going to be about change for the meter or snapping a holiday photo of them together. It’s going to be a little more complicated.
     Alex hadn’t been to see a doctor in four years, not even one of the new private practices that had been springing up all over since the restoration. Hospitals were horrible places, where people went to die. He and most of the country no longer trusted doctors, or anyone connected with the practice of medicine. It had long since been taken over by an enormous bureaucratic disease that went by many names, HealthALL—most people connected the first two letters with the last two and discarded the middle, NationCare, HealthUnion, PubliCare, and AMIA (the official agency acro) which allegedly stood for Advanced-Medical-something-something, but was rejected early on by the public because however you worded it, the Missing-In-Action ending stood out. And what you called it didn’t really matter. When one name soured, the marketing consultants went to the focus groups for new ones.
     AMIA’s first directive rode on a noisy “healthcare costs too much” campaign, and went on to cut every doctor’s and nurse’s salary in half. A year later the agency quartered all their salaries. Every honest hardworking doctor, nurse and medical specialist had found some other line of work by that time. That left all the cranks, cheats, inepts and medical school dropouts to fill their positions.
     AMIA’s second directive rode on a noisy “we must consolidate health organizations/small doctor’s practices aren’t playing by the rules” campaign, and went on to close every independent office, clinic and laboratory. That left no choice when a twelve-year-old boy broke his arm, a forty-year old man went into cardiac arrest, or a twenty-year old woman went into labor. They all ended up in one of the crowded public hospitals, waited in long lines to be shouted at by an overworked underpaid nurse, and treated for exactly fifteen minutes by a doctor who never completed medical school.
     AMIA wasn’t like every other faceless government agency, because it was Straff’s face everyone imagined when they stepped into the mix of blind regimentation, apathy and sadism that characterized most public hospitals: Straff swiveling in his comfortable chair at the heart of the agency, insulated from what was happening on the outside. He read the reports, stat sheets, listened to his administrators tell him how wonderful everything worked, and lived inside the future vision in his head.
     AMIA had been constructed, molecule by molecule (of whatever bricks are made of), under the leadership of the powerful and brilliant Dr. Ernest Straff. Some said he was a genius. Others pointed out that although he was a medical doctor and had even practiced for a while, he had spent much of his life as a teacher and researcher in theoretical nanotech medicine—with the idiotic implication that if someone’s going to enslave every doctor and nurse in the nation they’d better damn well get someone who actually worked with patients once in a while, not some bloody research scientist who had doctor in front of his name because he had once interned somewhere.
     At one time Dr. Ernest Straff could have been considered a visionary. He had preached the ideals of socialized medicine based on the coming miracle of molecular engineering. The idea was fairly sound. Doctors, like software engineers, would one day become obsolete. The ability to construct and repair life on the molecular and atomic level would solve every human ailment, cold sores to cancer—without cost, or at the least, very little cost.  Straff spent years architecting complicated structures woven from individual atoms. He wrote hundreds of journal articles and dozens of books about nanorobots that re-engineered human cells on the molecular level, even fantastic ideas far over the horizon of cosmetic nanosurgery. He once gave the keynote at a nanotech conference in New Orleans where he showed the world his designs for giving humans working wings.
     Although he had worked and preached tirelessly for decades, the miracle never happened or advanced too slowly. Nanotechnology, they said, was still years off, at least the wacky stuff Straff was peddling. Instead he ended up at the top of AMIA, a massively expensive agency that controlled, through a chaos of managers, every doctor’s waking hour, dispensing every tablet, every dose of cough medicine, every surgeon’s stitch, every slice of the scalpel. It was an immense failure. Mortality rates rose yearly. Millions died when disease swept through urban areas. Death and taxes were linked tighter than before. Suicides among doctors and nurses climbed. Most people had forgotten about Dr. Josef Mengele, the Nazi camp doctor at Auschwitz. That was ancient history. For years now, Dr. Ernest Straff had been called the Angel of Death, Doctor Death and other less flattering names.
     The two ghosts glanced at Kaffia and then stared at each other for five hundred milliseconds. The one with the pen wrote,
 
     We believe he prefers his surname.
 

 
6
The Underworld
 
 
“STRAFF VANISHED a few years ago,” said Kaffia flatly. “Hasn’t been seen since, unless you believe the tabloids.”
     Alex shook his head. “I never bought the cover-up stories. I always thought he was dead.” 
     The ghost with the pen wiped the page clean and nodded in understanding.
 
     He has given the world every reason to think so. He has a few friends who know he is alive and they have their reasons for keeping silent. They have left him alone, to continue his work, to try to undo what he has done. But there are some who have kept silent while seeking him with every means available. They wanted to find him first, to use Dr. Straff as they once did. He knew it was only a matter of time before his enemies would discover him. He had always hoped to have his work complete. Unfortunately, this is not how it ended. Dr. Straff planned for this emergency and needs your help.
 
     “You stupid?” Kaffia glared at the ghosts. “I mean, thanks for helping us out with Randal and his accomplices, but why would we want to help—or do anything for—Straff?”
     Alex was nodding and scowling. “Right. Randal Revard probably deserved what you gave him.” The corners of his mouth tightened at the thought of that bone snapping crunch he’d heard. “But why help Doctor Death?”
     Kaffia nodded along with him. “He’s a walking dead man. If we helped him we’d get painted with the same mad murdering scientist brush.”
     With every second that passed the idea of helping Dr. Death became more and more brainless. 
     “Why on earth would we want to get in on that? Is there a family in the country that didn’t lose at least one member to Straff’s advanced medical org? Plenty of them would be up for a pay-per-view Straff execution, especially if there was some sort of interactive mechanism that allowed you to torture him yourself before they off him.”
     “Why should we help Straff, instead of kill him?”
 
     Precisely because those who captured him do not want to kill him.
 
     Alex kept his scowl and turned it on Kaffia. She nodded back. 
     “What, so they’re going to pinch Straff for information?”
     “Get him to do research for them?”
 
     Yes.
 
     “What kind of research?”
     “Whoa,” said Kaffia. She gripped Alex’s arm harder, catching the excited edge in his voice. “Back up. Who took Dr. De—Straff?  Tell us everything you know.”
     The two ghosts looked at each other, deciding something.
 
     It would be best if our master told you himself. As we said, he expected this extremely urgent situation and has prepared something for you.
 
     “For us?” Alex looked intrigued. Kaffia elbowed him. 
     “Who are you guys?”
     “You work for Straff?”
 
     Doctor Straff created us. We are organisms with loose distribution and binding, tightly synchronized properties, LoDBots.
 
     “Cute.” Alex started with his first question. “Why can’t you talk?”  And got another elbow from Kaffia.  
     “Focus,” she murmured with a stern glance, and gestured with her index finger pressed to her thumb. She jutted her chin at the ghosts. “Bots created by Franken-Straff? Apparent self-awareness. Humanlike thinking and responding. The place to start here is whether you’re alive or not. Or are you just remotely operated?” 
     Alex nodded, reluctantly agreeing with her strategy. Hadn’t thought of that. If anyone had the ability to suck the soul out of a man and somehow stick into some weird semi-visible organism, it was Straff. 
     The ghosts looked at each other, maybe deciding how to explain their existence.
     “Still like to know why they don’t speak,” whispered Alex. 
     She was about to say something about the uselessness of Al’s pinpoint question when a solid wall of noise hit her from behind. It rolled over them like the leading edge of an explosion’s shockwave. Tree trunks creaked. Noise bounced off the concrete, the darkening streets and forest roof, shaking leaves from branches and merging into a violent clamorous riptide.  
     Alex and Kaffia spun around, heads swiveling toward the source of the sound. The ghosts glanced at each other, unperturbed, both looking up at the clearing above the skatepark.
     The sky was a dim pale blue, half of it blotted out by a dark rectangular shape with rounded edges, thundering engines and gun-turrets. Floodlights flicked on, casting daylight into the clearing. A black square opened on its side. A pair of soldiers in black and gray camo leaned out and clicked onto a dropline.
     Alex and Kaffia felt a polite finger tapping each on their shoulders and turned around. The ghost with the pen held up Alex’s journal.
 
     They are the same group of soldiers who took Dr. Straff. Walter will slow them down. You two come into the forest with me.
 
     Kaffia saw one of the gun turrets swivel in their direction and didn’t wait for Alex’s answer. She dropped to the ground, spun off the laces and tugged her skates free. She jumped up and grabbed her pack while the ghost who was not Walter bent down, made one arcing motion with his hand to sweep everything of Alex’s back into his pack.
     “Don’t Move!” A man’s amplified voice boomed down from the gunship. “On your knees with your hands on your head. Lock your fingers! You will be identified and escorted to a state holding facility!”  
     Walter soared into the air and met the two troopers as they descended, about halfway between the gunship and the ground. One of them swung a small automatic around and popped off a quarter of the clip right through Walter. The rounds hit the dirt track that led into the forest, raising a row of dust columns.
     Walter’s fingers swept through the steel cable, shearing it just below the troopers’ boots. The cable wound down, spiraling wide, and coiled into a heap on the ground below like a headless viper. The troopers dangled at the end of the cable forty feet above the basin.
     Two dull explosions ripped through the clearing. Someone up in the gunship fired warning shots from the fore-guns, putting two smoking holes in the concrete on the forest edge of the skatepark. 
     “HALT!” 
     “—hell I will!” Alex yelled through the noise.
     Two more rounds tore through the smooth hard surface, closer still, spraying chips of concrete. 
     “Joe!”
     Kaffia staggered back, mouth gaping, maybe even screaming but not loud enough to be heard over the gunship’s roaring turbines. The thump of the guns left another pair of holes in the concrete.
     The ghost ushering them toward the forest tossed the pen and journal to Alex, pointing insistently toward the locked gate. He gave Alex and Kaffia a stern look, jutted his chin toward the shadows beyond the skatepark, and swooped up to put himself between the guns. Alex grabbed his board, his pack, and bounded toward the woods. He stuffed his journal in as he ran. 
     In her socks, inlines swinging from one hand, her pack in the other, Kaffia met him at the gate, a framework of rusty poles welded together with a heavy latch and padlock. She spun backward just before impact, hopped her butt up on the top bar and swung her legs over. She hit the road on the other side and kept going. Alex, admiring her cop show choreography, heaved his stuff over in front of him and vaulted the gate right behind her.
     He picked up his gear and spun around to catch up with Kaffia just as the guns spit off a few more rounds, only one of which got by the second ghost. It shattered a thick tree trunk off to Alex’s right, spraying him with high velocity bark and shredded wood. The entire tree hopped from its base, staggered along the ground like a drunk and crashed to the forest floor, taking a few smaller trees down with it.
     Kaffia dashed back, grabbed Alex’s hand and yanked him deeper into the forest, following the overgrown dirt track when she could find it in the darkness. 
     “S—sorry.” Alex stumbled on the word, throwing it out after a few second’s desperate shrub hurdling and rough terrain sprinting. 
     The destruction stunned him. It galled his senses to see a sixty-foot tree off its trunk. One round from the gun had ripped apart a mature pine and set it dancing before gravity brought it sweeping to the ground. 
     The track turned several times, zigzagging through the forest, but eventually straightened out and looked better tended. 
     Alex reslung his back pack, looking over his shoulder.  The noise of the gunship hit his ears, broken by the forest’s thick foliage, but it was a far off roaring like the echoes of a dozen lawnmowers attacking a distant field. A thick fog set in over their heads, following them, oozing in between the trees, filling the space like spilled soup, deadening outside sounds. 
     Kaffia looked up. There were other noises high in the trees, clicking and rustling where there wasn’t wind, and dripping sounds where there shouldn’t have been things that dripped.
     They stopped when they reached a gray-shingled cottage with the front door blown off. The door lay shattered on the ground, bent in half, a metallic dribble of woodscrews leaving a trail from the doorframe. Hinges twisted, it leaned sadly against a tree like a soldier who’d been over-powered at his post and had dragged his dying body up against the trunk so he could get one last look at the world.
     Alex and Kaffia exchanged looks. They both turned to look along the path they'd taken, suddenly aware of where they were. 
     “No one’s ever gotten this far into the haunted forest.”
     “No one’ll believe it anyway.”
     “What now?” Alex said in an I’m-not-going-to-a-state-holding-facility kind of voice, even though he knew there wouldn’t be any holding facilities involved. It would be something efficient and deadly, couple rounds through the head, bodies dumped in a salt marsh.
     He wanted to get out of the forest, into the cottage, but it didn’t look defensible, and when the jumptroopers arrived it would be the obvious place to look.
     Kaffia shrugged, still breathing hard. The haunted forest suddenly made a lot more sense. “This is Straff’s house.” 
     She glanced at the quaint shuttered windows, frowning, but then turned away and looked eastward, wondering if they could get through the woods, cut through someone else’s property, and get out to Atlantic Avenue without being seen by the soldiers.
     “Those aren’t legitimates,” Alex put in, reading her expression, and pointing back the way they’d come.
     Kaffia glared back, and then swung her gaze around the dark clusters of thick tree trunks. “I know. Probably more in the woods.”
     “House without a door isn’t going to stop anyone. Climb the trees?”
     She gave him an angry shrug, looking down at her lime green outfit, which glowed a bit even in this dimness.
     He jutted his chin at her. “Told you my purple camo’d come in handy.”
     She stared around at the darkness, and made a little spiraling gesture with one hand, indicating everything, the context, the gunmen, the intelligent ghosts. “This has an Andreden documents, Rost Institute, duct tape vibe to it.”
     “I’m feeling it, too,” Alex whispered back. He didn’t want to be the first to mention it. “Hope not.”
     Movement along the road caught their eyes and they spun around, heart rates doubling. Walter and his twin rushed up like something bigger and more destructive than a gunship was behind them. Both the ghosts waved their arms, pointing ahead, urging them into the cottage. 
     Alex nodded to Kaffia and bounded through the entryway.  He pointed back at the gaping doorway as he glanced over his shoulder to Walter—or maybe it was the other one. 
     “I’m no security expert but I don’t think that’s going to stop those guys.”
     The ghost pointed deeper into the house, humorless. Kaffia took Alex’s hand. They ran through a normal looking living room with a plain brown couch and a pair of comfy chairs, past an upended dining room table and chairs. She jumped the jagged pieces of a coffee mug, landing in the kitchen. One of the ghosts went right to the cabinets under the sink, flung the doors open and went inside headfirst.
     The second ghost urged Alex in. Kaffia crouched, looking into the tunnel opening in the back wall of the undersink cabinet. Fitting through the hole wasn’t a problem. Where did it lead though?
     “Looks dangerous,” she said. A snap of tree branches from just outside the cottage brought her head around.
     Alex nodded and tossed his board and pack into the black hole. Not waiting for the sound of his stuff to hit the bottom, he followed it, diving headfirst like the ghost. Kaffia crawled into the cabinet next, holding her inlines like gold. She shook her head and went in after Al.
     She felt a hard cold blast of air hit her face and circle her body as she passed through the tunnel opening. It felt like someone dragging an icy steel cable over her skin, down her legs, over her feet. And then she was all the way into the lightless tunnel and falling vertically.  Her mouth opened to scream. She couldn’t tell which direction she was falling. At first it felt like continued headlong motion, but then it felt like feet first. Her eyes darted around the black space looking for a ref point.
     Kaffia looked over and Alex was standing right next to her, his board under his arm and pack slung over his shoulder. She saw him clearly but everything beyond him and around him was perfect black. She looked down at her feet, saw her dirty socks, bristling with leaves and foxtails, and detected a floor under her toes. She hadn’t felt her landing. 
     “Al?”
     “Weird, huh?” Alex said, and she nodded back at him absently, checking that her inlines were still with her.
     About a minute later, she whispered, “Very. Almost inexpressibly weird.”
     “Wonka-esque?” Alex ventured.
     “Bingo.”
     The second ghost appeared next to the first. They looked at each other and then both looked up and nodded as if everything was going according to some plan. They extended their arms and pointed beyond Kaffia and Alex. The two of them turned around. A bright hemisphere appeared at the end of a cobblestone road. The tunnel led up a steep incline from their feet into daylight. Alex scowled at the bright sky.
     “Pretty sure the sun’s beyond the sea-level tangent plane by now.”
     “But that looks like sunlight,” whispered Kaffia and took the first step forward.
     The road felt real through her socks and feet, hard and painful, like walking on billiard balls. Alex followed her and the ghosts drifted behind him.
     “What do you think it is?” She glanced from Alex to the ghosts who hadn’t yet said a word.
     Alex shook his head but shared his guessing anyway. “Underground hydrofarming? Probably illicit. Uh, alien spaceship? Also probably illicit. Against the prime directive and all.”
     “Nope,” said Kaffia who was the first to see the other side clearly. 
     Then Alex followed her into another world, where the sun had not yet set, the world under Doctor Death’s kitchen sink.
 

 
7
Enthusiastic Behavior Engineering
 
 
“JUNE TRIMONY. June Trimony. Chim-chim-cheree.” Greenleigh sang the words to the chimney sweep’s song in Mary Poppins.
     Trimony perked up and stretched her dry, cracked lips into something near a smile, even though coming from the mouth of the Chairman of the Rost Institute made it sound like a serial killer’s taunt to the parents of his victims. She tried to picture him dancing around the rooftops of London covered in soot, and for part of a second she felt like chirping a jaunty, “tawp o’ the mornin’, guv’nah.” Dick van Dyke, with his exaggerated Cockney accent, ought to be sidling into the torture chamber at any moment, followed by a gaggle of smudge-faced broom-wielding flue cleaners. 
     “I’ve always liked your name, June Trimony. It has an innocent sound, a girlish quality.”
     “I’m afraid I can’t say the same for you, Chairman Greenleigh.” Trimony shook her head wearily, wincing. She blinked away blood that had trickled into her eye. “But it’s funny,” she said hoarsely. “I studied you for years and I never suspected you of having a sense of humor. Even a cruel one.”
     “Not many people do,” whispered Greenleigh, flashed his teeth, and then he wrapped his fingers around four thick cables that went into the back of her skull and pulled. 
     Trimony screamed. Her eyes slammed tight, but every crease and wrinkle in her face shuddered. Her mouth filled with saliva, gurgling at the back of her throat. 
     Her head had been shaved in the back. Lumps of healing tissue mushroomed around the finger thick plastic connectors, two fused to the bone just above her hairline, one just behind her ears on either side of her head. The color-coded spider cabling snapped into her head with narrow white identification flags wrapping the hairfine wires in hundred lead bundles.
     Rost, under Greenleigh’s management, had taken somebody else’s tech developed for restoring sight and hearing to the blind and deaf, and used it to torture people, to listen in on their thoughts, to sift through the victim’s consciousness and eavesdrop on the visuals they stirred up.
     Trimony drove her body against the straps, measuring her motion in millimeters. Her head and neck were loose, but hurt too much to move. 
     “You’re going to help me, June,” said Greenleigh calmly. “I know you will. I’ve been watching you for the last four years, and I know how you think. You’re tired. You just want to go home.”
     “Rethink that!” She pushed the words through her teeth.
     “I said!” He shouted over her screaming. “You are going to help me!”
 
#
 
     Nicholas. His name was Nicholas. My nephew. Trimony’s thoughts rolled around, spreading out with an even grinding noise, like a jar of marbles freed on a basketball court. Nicholas. When she said his name a flash of wet granite with neat chiseled letters, Nicholas, pushed into her peripherals. The “c” and the “o” cupped the rainwater as it streamed over them.
     She’d helped Nicholas set up some Net gear when he came home from college. First summer back home. Aunt June, the hacker. Who better to get Nicholas set up with some clean equipment, trace-free on a wide pipe?
     She heard her own voice, a conversation with her nephew, but couldn’t determine if it had taken place or her imagination had spun it out of different experiences. 
     Nicholas, a name cut into wet stone.
     “Do you know what a cipher is?”
     Nicholas seemed uncertain, and said cautiously, “I think so.”
     “The word has several meanings but I’m referring to the slang term for political prisoners who are manipulated to reduce them to laboring animals. What do they teach you in school?”
     He slid a slight defensive edge into the steady stream of his voice. “I’ve heard them called ciphers, but in the school work they’re called by the technical name, Sub-functional Human Laborer, and the term we use is SHEL—sometimes zombie.”
     “I’ve heard them called SHELs. That’s a new term. We call them ciphers. Look up cipher in the dictionary. A cipher’s a zero. A cipher is someone who has no weight, worth, or influence, a nonentity, a hole in reality. There are fifteen million ciphers in this country, and close to quarter billion worldwide.” 
    “Those are the numbers they've used for two years.” 
     Almost certain of the answer but with the question bubbling into his mouth like the sour taste of the previous meal, he asked, “What…what happens to them all?”
     “It’s considered a temporary program for Rost. They all die,” she said flatly.
     Two days later, Nicholas died decorating the room his parents had cleared for him over the garage. He’d come home from college, put up some curtains, fell off the ladder into the window, and cut his arms to the bone on broken glass.
     Aunt June’s serious voice called up the back stairs, “You all right, Nick? What was that noise? Nicholas?”
     Rain tapped and splattered over the top of his gravestone. 
     Nicholas bled to death in the emergency room. Dr. Death had claimed another life.
 
#
 
     “O…K. What do you want?” Trimony’s split, dripping lips shivered. Blood sour in her mouth, she pushed one of her teeth along the gutter between her gumline and the inside of her cheek on the right side. She dug her tongue under the tooth and nudged it over her bottom lip. It slid toward her chin in a flow of red spit. 
     Greenleigh stood up. He’d taken one of the stools along the back wall, attempting to get beyond the range of flying body fluids, but his behavior engineer was one of the more enthusiastic ones. 
     Greenleigh glared at the sleeve of his shirt, flicked away a little of wedge of something wet that had landed on him, and sniffed the dark stain on the soft white material, grimacing.
     “Damn,” said Greenleigh, not to Trimony, but to the six-foot humanoid in the turquoise plastic bodysuit, apron, hood, and mask. The torturer put down his club, held up a hand apologetically and stepped from the room, closing the door quietly behind him.
     “June Trimony.”
     One bloodshot eye rolled left to find Greenleigh. The other swelled closed, brown and puffy purple, as if the torturer had scooped her eye socket clean and rammed an overripe plum into it. 
     Greenleigh orbited the operating table, deep in thought. “My position here is temporary, Trimony. I can be honest with you.” 
     Trimony snorted, repeating Greenleigh’s words, “honest with you” in her thoughts. Fate sealing words, those.     
     Greenleigh continued with a petulant edge to his voice. “Andreden doesn’t sleep. He hasn’t stopped at Zoerner or the SACB. He’s back in California, back at Knowledgenix, back to his little robots. But he wants me dead. He wants Rost closed. And he will have his way very soon, marching me off to prison.  Unless…”
     Trimony stared at the ceiling, one-eyed, shuddering, trying to hold in her tears. “Andreeeed…” She hadn’t heard that name spoken aloud in years. He’s still alive. 
     Her body jerked in the straps. “Ammmm…”
     Greenleigh stopped pacing, looking down at her.
     “Amelia,” said Trimony, adding, “ah?” because she’d forgotten to make it a question.
     “Valera?” Greenleigh folded his arms. “Amelia Valera’s the only one to survive the cipher pools. Went in, and somehow came out mentally intact.” He said it sourly as if embarrassed to repeat a cheap bit of trivia.
     Trimony’s body stiffened. A hoarse squeal came from her throat, a response to the pain in her face when her undamaged eye widened.
     “Greenleigh?” 
     He bent down.
     “Go to hell!” She spit blood in his face.
 
 
#
 
     Amelia…Valera. Beautiful girl. Shoulder length black hair, skin like honey, dark eyes. Her father is Costa Rican? 
     Trimony pictured John Andreden, the machine intelligence and autonomous robotics visionary—and tyrant-dethroning “rabble rouser.” He’d certainly changed since she’d last set eyes on him, sometime before the overthrow.  Probably had gone a little grayer, but she pictured him as she remembered him on their last meeting, standing next to Amelia Valera. 
     Andreden loved her. She loved the sea even more than he did. And the mind, consciousness, how the brain worked. Made for each other. Valera, the neurophysicist, went down shooting SAC Board commandos. They hit Andreden first, took him alive, and shipped him off to Rost. Amelia, they dumped into the cipher program, and turned her into an animal, a human without its own mind.
     …Her hair was gray, uncolored, brittle, chopped close to her skull. Her skin was a streaked and blotchy gray, dirty, the color of her rough clothes, her sky, and her mind. Her world was a gray existence void of memory, empty of sun-rayed days, of dark nights, of time. She knew nothing of yesterday, nothing of tomorrow. She didn’t know who she had been or who she was now. She didn’t know that her name had been Amelia Valera. She had a number that identified her among the other fifteen million ciphers. She didn’t know it. Others could read it by finding the tattooed sequence on her body. 
     She knew the bleached asphalt and concrete.  The pits, embedded stones, ridges, gaps, painted stripes of the old roads. She knew the shiny hard wood of the push broom she’d been ordered to drive. She knew the dark brown bits of leaves, strips of foil, candy wrappers, fragments of tree bark, and billowing, living clouds of gray dust that preceded her up the street, the discarded crumbs of nature that she pushed into neat little piles. And she knew the time that she must return to the cipher compound. She did not know what time was, or the difference between early and late, but if you asked her when she was scheduled to return to her cell, she could tell you. And although she was entirely ignorant of hours, minutes, time tables and clocks, the biomechs embedded in her skull took care of that for her.  
     If one of the retrieval trucks neglected to pick her up, there was a programmed anxiety response that kicked in about six hours after her sweep should have ended. Nightly cipher details spiraled their way through the city streets, picking up the forgotten forms of humans whose muscle and ligament and structure remained but whose souls had decomposed. By midnight the ciphers wailed on street corners, afraid to move, not knowing who they were, where they were, lost in the half-reality of an animal without a mind, and without the one faculty that animals other than man possessed: instinct. 
 
#
 
     “Is she still breathing?”
     The torturer nodded, his turquoise suit crinkling. The short wooden club dripped syrupy red over his gloved fingers.
     “Slow down, but keep working her. I’m going to shower and get a clean shirt.” He pulled open the door. “Back in fifteen.”
 
#
 
     The alleged advocates of liberty, with their twisted notion that there was a difference between the destruction of human life and the destruction of the mind, had finally forced the weakened judiciaries to abolish the death penalty. In its place they offered living-death, a monstrous subhuman purgatory between hell and earth. A group of microbiologists opposed to capital punishment for any crime conjured up a “benign and productive” alternative to death. Never mind that the first two hundred deathrow “volunteers” died slowly and in agony. Once they’d perfected the techniques, they produced millions of docile laborers that could be safely distributed throughout the cities of the world in guided work programs. The scientists at the Rost Institute developed a modified pathogenic microorganism injected into the bloodstream of the men and women convicted of violent crimes, rapists, serial offenders, and—when Zoerner held power—anyone who committed crimes against the state. The cipher pools were continually freshened with growing numbers of political prisoners. 
     The Rost bioengineers were pleased with the result. 
     One of the injected agents was similar to bacteria already contained in the human body, they told the press, neglecting to explain that it was similar to bacteria that congregate in the intestines of warm-blooded animals. When the origin of the desecrative pathogen was finally revealed, the Rost Institute frontmen came out with an honest tone as if they’d overlooked some innocuous detail. “The human intestinal tract harbors over four-hundred different species of bacteria, of which there are thousands of strains. They’re generally divided into two groups, ‘friendly’ and ‘unfriendly.’ We’re simply using some processing functionality of one of the unfriendly strains to silently and painlessly modify the patient’s brain tissue.” 
     Few were troubled by their euphemistic tone or the compassionate manner in which they explained the similarities in the way the pathogen processed the contents of your stomach and the contents of your skull. It was uncontroversial. Murderers, rapists and journalists swept the streets in front of your house, never looking up from the dark gray pavement, never even thinking to ogle your young daughter, or eye the preciously cared for vehicle in your driveway. The ciphers labored stupidly in the blazing summer sun and shit-for-brains took on a new meaning.
     But like a pathological liar who must maintain an ever-growing network of lies in order to keep up the honest front with everyone he meets, the Rost Institute management had to add aggressive measures every few months to stay one step ahead of the downward spiral. Their last measure consisted of combing the cipher pool in Joseph Mengele fashion for anyone who “stood out”—mostly females with above average attractiveness. They were culled and sent off to one of the basements where they waited dumbly in long lines for someone to guide them to the cauterization station. The Rost doctors jokingly called it the “disassembly line.” The problem the institute had to combat wasn’t male ciphers raping the females. The male ciphers didn’t have enough going on in their heads to understand what they were capable of. After a six month investigation, the institute study concluded that it had become a popular diversion among drunken university students in some of the better schools to ride around, capture one of the more attractive ciphers, fill her with bourbon, and gang rape her. The Rost Institute’s response was open-minded and pragmatic. They didn’t want to have to deal with the potentially thousands of pregnant subhuman women, particularly since the pathogenic nature of the “humane cure for the death penalty” guaranteed subhuman results. The Rost response to inebriated students raping and impregnating members of their labor pool: “The surgical sealing of the fallopian tubes to induce sterility in female ciphers.”
 
#
 
     “She’s out, sir. Unconscious.”
     “It’s just not our day, is it?” Greenleigh grinned at the behavior engineer and then turned to study Trimony’s bruised, broken body. “Get her back to her room. Clean her up. Call me when she’s awake.” 
 
#
 
     Straff opened his eyes, made a few slow sweeps of his white painted prison cell, and then closed them. He dropped his face into his hands, sobbing, his shoulders jumping in time with short moans and croaks of “What have I done?”
     He gripped his head tight in his hands, squeezing it, fingers digging into his scalp. He couldn’t stop the nightmares, dark blurs of hate that haunted his peripherals. They surrounded him, stared at him, shifting black clouds, human shaped, the ghosts of the millions who’d died under his administration. He felt them crowding him, sucking away his breath, pulling at his focus, feeding on his fear, burrowing into his soul like grave worms into a corpse.
     “Ernest?” Greenleigh slid into the cell followed by two jumptroopers.
     Straff looked up. “What do you want, Greenleigh?”
     “All of it. All your technology, your lab books. I want everything you have tucked away inside your old bald head, Ernest.”
     Straff nodded, not agreeing, but acknowledging the demand. What else would he be after?
     “Did you work alone?” Greenleigh asked casually, picking something off his sleeve.
     Straff’s eyes snapped to his, and they glared at each other for a few seconds, each drawing the wrong conclusions from the other’s reaction. Straff thought of Walter and Wesley and anyone they recruited for the plan. Greenleigh thought, the old man had some help. Who else’s lucky brain gets to have one of our installed SoulYokes?
     Straff cleared his throat and looked at the floor. “I haven’t worked with anyone since before…AMIA.” There was a heavy, suffocating pain in the pause. “And after…no one wanted to.”
     Greenleigh started nodding slowly before Straff named the Advanced Medical Industry Administration, and ended vigorously on his last words. “Acceptable answer.” He didn’t believe Straff, of course.
     Straff buried his face in his hands again.
     Greenleigh added conversationally, “I have a ground team assembled to take samples from your defense system. You’ve made significant progress in nano, Ernest. Congratulations.”

 
 
 
 
 
8
The Assignment
 
 
THE SECOND TIME I saw Kaffia she was wearing another black T-shirt with white typewriter-style writing. I couldn’t figure it out, except to make the connection with the phrase “between a rock and a hard place.” 
 
     [Person]<-(Betw)-
          <-1-[Rock]
          <-2-[Place]->(Attr)->[Hard]
 
     I qualified for a loaner computer from school. It was a waddling pig of a notebook, but it had all the apps I would need for doing reports, calculating stuff for math, drawing, and a Net connection for doing research and getting assignments and other files from the computer to the profs. 
     I was a Lyceum day student, so I didn’t have access to the dorm WAPs, but there were other ways to get wirelessly onto the Net at school, access points left unsecured, and a few public points in the library and study hall.
     I spent four hours after classes, my face inches from the screen, searching for references to NDIS. There were lots of them, a lot more than I expected. Why’d everybody think it was a big secret? 
     I hardly slept that night, planning my appearance and demonstrating my ability to learn what her name stood for. I planned it a hundred different ways, but ended up going with a casual approach, be myself. That’s what everyone always says is the best way, right?
     Heartened by my discovery skills, I searched the grounds for Kaffia/NDIS the next day at lunch. It took me half an hour of frantic exploring to find her, sitting under a grove of birch trees with four or five other hacker types. I pulled in a deep breath, marshaled my intro, and walked straight up to her.
     “So, does your name stand for, Network Driver Interface Specification?”
     Her eyes swung to mine, clicking like magnets, and wouldn’t let me go. She studied me in silence while I pulled back helplessly.
     Words started spilling from my mouth. Horrified, I couldn’t stop them. “I got a loaner. Connect at the library. I searched the Net for your acronym and that’s what came up.” My voice got all rough and wheezy toward the end.
     Her eyes narrowed. I’d never realized how dark and liquid shiny they were. I don’t think I’d ever been this close to her before. And I couldn’t breathe. My windpipe shutdown. My breath came out in short squeaks. She had a total Vader Your-lack-of-faith-is-disturbing hold on me.
     “You think I named myself after a networking spec?”
     I shook my head immediately. Obviously not. She raised one finger and pointed it at me. 
     “What’s your name?”
     “Al—Alex Shoaler.”
     “Searched for my name, did you?”
     I nodded back.
     “Here’s your assignment, Al.”
     Like an idiot, I kept nodding. Anything to get out of her tractor beam. I didn’t have Obi Wan to sacrifice on this one.
     “Take your time,” she said slowly and very calmly. “Do some homework. There are a lot of search tools on the Net. They do things in different ways and return different results, some better than others. They take advantage of powerful ideas, stuff you’ve probably never heard of. Part of the problem with today’s data push model is that if someone doesn’t want you to know something, it’s hard to find. Latent semantic indexing?”
     She was speaking a foreign language. I shook my head like a tourist.
     “LSI uses statistically derived lists of concepts instead of individual words to find content.” She shrugged as if that was unimportant. “I’ll tell you right now you probably won’t find my meaning of my name on the Net. But…” She lifted her finger higher and switched to an all-is-not-lost tone. “I’m giving you something easier.” 
     She paused. My shoulders felt heavy. I waited. I felt the pull of the earth’s gravity well, and the weight of 62 miles of atmosphere on my body. I took another breath. 
     “Come back, Alex Shoaler, when you know the difference between searching and finding.” 
     She let me go. I staggered away, still nodding and staring at her. I looked closer. What is she? I’ve read about them. I idolize one, the seriously badass robotics expert, John Andreden. Is this really what’s meant by “guru?” Someone with more than just knowledge and deep understanding, but power behind it?
     My mind raced with questions. Searching. Finding. Searching. Finding. Searching is looking for something. Finding is…getting there, right? My brain wouldn’t work smoothly. Thoughts came out in chunks or not at all. My assignment. She gave me an assignment. She didn’t shoo me away like an insect. She didn’t pretend I wasn’t there. She spoke to me like she didn’t expect me to fail her.
     I nodded gratefully, formally, almost a bow, and she nodded back like an empress sending one of her subjects off on an errand. I was dismissed. 
     NDIS turned to one of her imps, a scrawny prep who’d done a portrait of her as a stately Frazetta-style African princess in dark earthy pastels, with draped leopard skins and lots of brass that reflected the glow of the cities she’d conquered and burned. 
     The bastard! She gave me some cryptic task, simple on its face but a hundred miles deep (e.g., Ring to Orodruin), and here he was drawing pictures of her. Okay, he was an artist, a good one.  But no better with pencils and pastels than I was with a pencil and paper. I can write. I can build plots and suspense. I’m a storyteller. 
     Then it hit me. This prep was already known to her, already under her spell, already in her world. I’ll bet Kyle Vickery and his friends didn’t bother him. This one had already paid his dues. She’d probably given him some cryptic task and he hadn’t failed.
     I walked away unhappy but determined. Neither would I.

 
 
 
9
Straff’s Other House
 
 
THE FIRST THING KAFFIA DID in the sunlit world under Doctor Death’s kitchen sink was sit down and pick the stuff out of her socks. She dug out a pair of lime Converse All-Star’s from her pack and laced them up. Rooted to the spot by the experience of falling underground and emerging in another place, Alex swiveled around at the knees and hips, studying the new world with a mixture of intense interest and puzzlement. 
     He turned back to the tunnel entrance, a black hemisphere, man-height. His eyes dropped, crossed the cobblestone path that elbowed right and headed toward a small cottage, which looked a lot like the one they’d just come through, except that this one wasn’t surrounded by thick-misted forest, and probably didn’t go through the usual building permit process.     
     Alex tilted his head back and stared up, partly through one of the ghosts. The light beaming down on them from the azimuth of a clear blue sky made Walter and his twin even less perceptible. Alex chewed on the fleshy bit that stuck out a little from the inside wall of his mouth on the left side. He glanced at the ghosts, and jerked his thumb at the tunnel entrance.
     “Can the troopers follow us down here?”
     They shook their heads synchronously.
     He looked at the cottage, a bordering white picket fence, fields of grass and tall spindly pines. The tunnel cut into a cliff face of granite fifty feet high, and it seemed to curve slightly inward and wrap around the fields, the groves of birch and maple, the entire world. He could just make out the gray stone walls through the trees, maybe half a mile away. The sky rose above them, but he couldn’t guess how high. It appeared thick, liquid, and atmosphere-like. He thought about falling through the hole under the sink. He couldn’t get a grasp on how far he’d dropped, though. It could have been a hundred feet. Could’ve been a thousand.
     The ghosts drifted off toward the cottage, and he followed at a distance.
     “C’mon, Joe.”
     He pulled his board tighter. No riding on cobbles unless you wanted to rattle your teeth loose. Kaffia jumped to her feet and caught up to him. The two of them approached the little house, walking straight but looking around at the world as if they’d never seen one before.
     Walter and his twin waited for them on the front steps and then, just like ghosts, went right through the door without opening it. This stunt pulled Alex and Kaffia’s eyes around to the front and kept them there. They didn’t even need to glance at each other with the usual “You see that?” gape.
     Kaffia pressed her fingers against the smooth painted wood of the door. Alex tried the knob, turned it and pushed the door in easily. Having rushed through Straff’s above ground cottage in the dark, there was no way to compare furnishings and interior decoration.
     Kaffia glanced around. Had to be different, though. The front room was full of books. She’d have noticed them in the cottage above.
     Doctor Death’s underground retreat was nice, a little old fashioned, but tasteful, with big leather armchairs and circular mahogany end tables. The living room and dining room walls were lined with bookcases stuffed with technical books and journals. The dining room table, a highly polished rectangle of heavy dark reddish wood, was set for a single diner at one end and stacked high with papers and books on the other. Kaffia checked out the tiny kitchen and then went back to sift through the papers on the dining room table.
     Alex, still standing thoughtfully in the front room, shook his head at one of the ghosts, pointing behind him toward the door. “How’d you go through it?”
     The ghost nodded, showed a hint of a smile on his pale lips, and pulled open a drawer in an end table next to one of the chairs, pointing into it. Alex put down his pack and board next to Kaffia’s stuff. He picked up the only thing in the drawer, a big old-fashioned brass-ringed magnifying glass. He hefted it like a sword. It was heavy in his hand.
     “Nice,” he muttered. The smooth warm metal handle felt good against his skin.
     The ghost drifted down right next to Alex and gestured to his outstretched arm, pointing at the glass. 
     “Ah.” He nodded, bent over the ghost’s arm, and stared at it through the convex circle.
     “N—nnno!” He stuttered excitedly, pulled his head back sharply and then looked again. “No way!”
     He remembered looking at his own skin through a magnifying glass when he was six, and he probably had the same reaction to what looked like the pores, hair follicles and wrinkly polygonal sections of skin of a pale elephant.
     What he saw through Straff’s glass was completely different. Thousands of clear shiny elliptic capsules, each smaller than a grain of sand, floated in the air in tight formation, rubbing against each other, rippling and overlapping when the ghost flexed his arm. There must be billions of them. The ghost’s arm alone must be thousands of the capsules thick—tens of millions in his entire arm.
     Alex looked up from the magnified view, his eyes gone glassy, his thought roaming over distant landscapes in his head. If Straff created these things, he has gone way beyond—
     The ghost tapped him on the shoulder and pointed across the room, opposite the armchairs. Alex hadn’t noticed the video panel that took up the only blank vertical wallspace. He blinked at what looked like a typical UI, and then his eyes shot to the display’s top, to text appearing at a slow readable rate and scrolling by. 
 
     …enables startling abilities such as passing through solid surfaces like a door (an illusion really) because as each successive rank of nodes touches the door’s face it drops away, curls under the space between the threshold and the door, reverses order and reassembles its shape on the other side, giving the appearance of passing through solid wood.
 
     Alex held a hand up, about to wave Kaffia over, but she was deep in a thick binder full of paper, flipping pages, reading at a tremendous rate, scowling, looking for some referenced page. She was busy, so he didn’t bother her.
     “I missed the first part of what you were saying,” said Alex, pointing at the video panel. Kaffia’s last question returned to him. “Writing, I mean. What are you, then? Are you alive?”
 
     Dr. Straff created us. We are…
 
     “You’re Walter?”
 
     Wesley. This is Walter. We are LoDBoTS, an aggregate organism. Each of us is a multi-billion-node network with loose distribution, loose binding, tight synchronization (LD/LB/TS) properties. We can maintain a specified shape. Each node can detach and reattach, move independently, fuse into a fixed lattice.
 
     Alex nodded. Cool names. Walter and Wesley. He continued chewing his lip. “That’s not exactly what I was looking for. I mean, you can talk…or write. You’re like machines. You can use language. What I mean…” He stammered a little, looking for words. It had always been easier for him to think and write then to think and speak aloud, and being good with words didn’t mean you were good with the right kind of words. 
     Kaffia would understand where he was going. His world was about mechanics and electricity. Give him a yellow violet yellow resistor code and he’d tell you 470k Ohms. She was the grid hacker, the binary thinking, reduce to pixels, metadata advocating, digitizing sort. She was 31337. And this was moving the whole situation even closer to the Andreden video, artificial consciousness, Rost Institute, duct tape vibe Kaffia had mentioned in the woods above. Andreden was a groundbreaker in this area, and even though they’d both learned something from Andreden’s unpublished work, she understood this AI, A-life kind of stuff far better than he did. 
     He looked in through the dining room. He was about to interrupt her, but Wesley held his hand out toward a narrow piece of wall next to the front door. 
     Alex turned, peering at the first of three small-framed pictures. There were three men and a woman, posing together. There were hints of smiles on their lips as if the pic had been taken a little by surprise, and they hadn’t expected to put the situation down for posterity. Two of the men were older, going gray or even further. The balding, sort of frumpy-looking one must be Straff. A tall African-American man with short white streaked hair, wearing shorts and sandals with an untucked button-down shirt, stood next to Straff with his arm flung over his shoulder. A dark-haired woman stood next to Straff with her arm around the man in the far right of the pic. 
     Alex looked closer and sucked in a short breath. It was John Andreden, the visionary engineer who ran a robotics company on the west coast. His company made the most sophisticated underwater machines in the world, deep mining explorers, cable inspecting floor tractors, AUV’s. Alex idolized him and here he was in a picture with Doctor Death, not exactly smiling, but there’s no gun to his head.
     Wesley’s blurred finger entered his field of vision, tapping on the glass over Andreden. Alex stepped back, nodding at both ghosts. “I know. That’s John Andreden. He and Martin Allievi—“ He pointed to the man on the other side of Straff. “—run Knowledgenix. They’re both geniuses. Andreden helped with the overthrow, with Zoerner’s downfall.” He shook his head, stunned. “Wha—what’s he doing with Straff?” 
     He followed Walter and Wesley across the living room, back to the video panel.
 
     The part of us that you are interested in, the part of us that understands and forms concepts was not created by our master, but by that man, John Andreden. Doctor Straff created our form. Knowledgenix provided Personifex, the intelligence and communications interface.
 
     Alex’s heart thumped in his chest. He fought the force that tried to pull him to the floor. Andreden and Straff together? No! He had trouble standing. It was like the world had slipped off its axis and plunged into the fusion reaction at the system’s core. How could Andreden participate in anything that Straff was doing? Andreden’s a genius. He fought against Doctor Death. He helped defeat the Purists. Why would he get mixed up with Straff? His mind shook out a reluctant okay. Straff’s a genius in his own right, but a dark and sinister kind a genius. His advanced medical org’s responsible for putting millions in their graves. Millions of people. Millions! Cold and dead because of him. Straff is bad.  Andreden’s not.
     “Al?”
     He didn’t hear her over the roaring in his ears.
     “Alex?”
     Her call broke through his self-absorption. He snapped his head up and made his way into the dining room. 
     “What?” Alex asked dizzily, lifting his eyes from Straff’s dining table and catching the intensity in hers. “What is it?”
     “The man pages for this,” she whispered while reading. She didn’t see him shake his head.
     He looked at a half curled page, perspective views of some kind of machine, made up of blue, green, yellow and red blocks. He gave her a puzzled expression.
     She looked at him like a stranger. “The manual? Man-you-al?” She straightened her expression, hiding her reaction to his confusion. “You okay?”
     He waved at her, blinking. He didn’t want to bring up Andreden. It was a painful subject between the two of them. If she brought it up that was fine. 
     “Yeah,” he whispered, and looked down at the paper. “What is it?”
     “It’s a self-replicating machine…made of LEGO. It can select blocks from a random source and build another one of itself. Then there’s a second machine that disassembles the first machine and puts all the blocks, wires, motors, embedded comp brick and batteries back into random source bins. The newly built assembler builds another of itself and then moves on to the disassembly station.”
     “Cool,” He said slowly and chewed his lip. He loved LEGO, but he was disturbed by the thought of Doctor Death sitting on the floor amid piles of colored plastic blocks. “What’s Straff doing with it? Kinda creepy.”
     “He tried to make a point. He unveiled this machine years ago at a nanotech conference in Minneapolis. No one thought it could be done. There’s an old argument that compares the difficulties of molecular manipulation to a machine made out of LEGO that could connect and disconnect—manipulate—LEGO blocks. You know, sometimes the blocks get stuck, especially those narrow single height ones and the little black cylindrical connectors. They would be difficult for a machine to manipulate. But Straff did it.”
     “What exactly did he do?”
     “He showed them the door to what’s possible.”

 
 
 
10
Hex and LERGs and Rock and Roll
 
 
THE THIRD TIME I saw Kaffia I was sitting outside the dean’s office on a Tuesday morning, waiting to get yelled at for copying someone else’s research report, only I didn’t do it. Somehow someone had copied my paper, turned it in to Mr. Copplin, and accused me of stealing a draft of theirs. The problem was that I didn’t know who it was. I asked, of course, but they handed me a bunch of student confidentiality crap.
     Anyway, Kaffia walked by, looked my way, scowled a bit and did this little smile thing with a slight nod. It almost felt like a welcome-to-the-club kind of salute, like she was telling me that she got in trouble all the time, and it was somehow good that I had now landed in some.
     (Black t-shirt with white lettering and a blood red heart: I ♥ Phreaks).
     I felt better for four and a half minutes then the dean called me into his office and ripped me a new one. Felt like more than one. He called my mother at work, and told me there were no second chances for offenses of this kind. One more and I was out.
     Mom cried. Anger and guilt fought an epic battle that ranged all over my body, ending with what felt like tendon damage in my ankles. (I couldn’t skate for two days). Mom had borrowed against the house. I had a vague idea of what a second mortgage was, and knew it wasn’t good. She worked into the evenings so that she could afford Lyceum tuition. 
     The next day I produced all my drafts, my written notes, everything that showed that I had done the actual work, but it didn’t seem to matter. Well, I think it didn’t matter. I’m not sure, but the dean, after reviewing my work, may have had some doubts about the claims against me. Still, the offense remained on my record, and Mr. Copplin hated me from that point on. Nothing I turned in would ever be satisfactory.
     My fifth week at the Lyceum and my life was about as close to over as it’s ever been. Then, without warning, NDIS walks past me on Friday and says, “Al, you up for a little fun tomorrow?”
     My mouth sagged open. I still hadn’t worked more than a few hours on the assignment she’d given me.
     “Take that as a yes.” She rattled off her home address, waved as she walked off and then she shouted across the quad, “9:15 AM. Don’t be late!” 
     I think I stood there frozen for fifteen minutes, and then, damn, I was late for Copplin’s History of the Americas.
     The next morning I woke early after almost no sleep, jumped on my board and headed up Ocean Boulevard. 
     Mom and I live in a small house on 1A. It’s been in her family for generations. Not a lot of room but it’s near the ocean, which is the way both of us like it. (Mom spends more time walking up and down Hampton Beach than she spends in the house). It’s winterized, has heating and a fireplace, so the cold isn’t too bad. 
     Kaffia lived right on Atlantic Ave. in Little Boars Head, prime North Hampton real estate. Her place was so big I had trouble finding the front door. Actually the real problem was that there were a lot of doors, but there were probably two or three that were used most. To use one of the wrong ones meant you were a stranger. No one in these big New England homes uses the front door. They all have mudrooms and back verandas and side entrances for everyday use. I rolled around her driveway trying to decide which door to knock on when she came out of the house. 
     I was dressed like I normally dress, baggy black shorts, an old Boston SF Con t-shirt and hightops. Kaffia came out of the house in a short pastel sundress with pale yellow flowers. She looked… fragile. Like a little girl.
     When I said, “What’s with the dress?” She gave me a bitter how-about-I-cut-out-your-tongue-and-wear-it-on-a-necklace-to-warn-other-stupid-question-askers? look. 
     She followed that up with, “Shut the F up. I’m on a mission. You want in on a typical Saturday or not?”
     I nodded and got in the car with her. It was an old silver Honda, parked between a BMW and a Land Rover. I didn’t ask how she was able to drive without supervision at fourteen, but I was impressed with her skill and surprising adherence to the road laws and automotive safety conventions. (None of that New Hampshire Live Free or Die stuff. She made me wear my seatbelt). 
     We drove up Route 1 toward Portsmouth then headed out to the mall at Newington. 
     She didn’t say much. Asked me what kind of music I liked. I told her all kinds, but my favorite’s ‘70s progressive rock, Flower Travellin’ Band, old Yes, and the greatest band ever is, of course, Gentle Giant. She just gave me a you’re weird look. 
     I asked her if she really broke into NASA Ames Research Center.
     She countered with, “At Moffet Field?” Then shrugged. “Never hear it from me. That’s how you get caught.”
     I asked her a couple times about our plans, and she repeated her answer. “Just want to check something out. See if it works. Nothing illegal.”
     I didn’t say anything about driving without a license—or whatever it’s called when you get caught driving a car before you’re even old enough.
     About halfway there Kaffia reached into the backseat and pulled a little book from her backpack. She dropped it on my lap and put her hand back on the wheel.
     “Read that.”
     “Aristotle,” I said, scanning the glossy orange cover. A long word starting with an N—Nico-something—followed by Ethics.
     “Greatest hacker who ever lived. The man did everything, defined methods for a bunch of sciences, biology, logic, embryology, even the study of art. He got his hands dirty, he swam in the lagoon of Pyrrha to look for interesting sea-life, he taught paupers and kings, he was a father, he knew joy, he knew sorrow—his wife died young, you know? Aristotle really lived in this world…and he wasn’t afraid to live in it.” 
     With this last line she gave me a long, meaningful you-know-who-I-mean stare. 
     I didn’t. While the car sat at a stoplight, I sat in silence and tried to remember something I’d read about Aristotle. 
     “Wasn’t Aristotle kind of a my-way’s-the-only-way, don’t look at the outside world kind of guy?” 
     Kaffia gave me a disgusted look, like I’d already been corrupted. “Don’t believe everything you read. Anyone who says that just hasn’t read the source. They’re confusing Aristotle with Aristotelianism. It’s a crime what happened. Not just to Aristotle. It happened to a lot of brilliant ancient thinkers. Aristotle would have been the first one to say, ‘Use your own eyes, dipshit! Pull it apart! What’s it made of?’  But later thinkers—I mean slavish followers—took everything Ari said like it was written in stone and refused to see what the world showed them. The example always given is the medieval churchmen refusing to look through Galileo’s telescope because they didn’t want to see anything that might disagree with Aristotle’s works. A lot easier for them to kill Galileo. That kind of thing happened over and over again, until you have idiots today spouting nasty comments about the greatest hacker who ever lived.”
     I didn’t move, except to tighten my grip around the door handle. She was angry now, and I didn’t want her to turn it on me.
     “Go to the source, man,” murmured Kaffia after five minutes of huffing and high-speed driving. “Fucking idiots! Read the source code! That’ll always be my advice.”
     When we got to Newington we walked the length of the mall, and on the return trip stopped at a kiosk ATM. I thought she was getting cash. She grabbed my arm and pulled me closer.
     “Watch this,” she whispered and pressed two of the buttons at the same time. I looked at the screen. Instead of the usual five or six banking menu items, a “Service Menu” appeared with ways to change the system time, drive configuration, and one named, Customer Transactions.
     “I’m going to peruse.” She jutted her chin toward a row of benches. “Keep a lookout.”
     I was sweating now. What is she doing? Why am I here? I was jumpy—more than I normally am. People were looking at me. A line was forming behind her, impatient shoppers checking their watches, a man in a suit on his phone. Time dilated. I guessed a 10:1 ratio; with every second, ten seemed to pass. Then it got worse. With every second that passed, time seemed to move even slower. It crawled to a halt. It was probably only two or three minutes total but it was like Kaffia/NDIS played with the ATM for half an hour.  
     And here comes a security guard from the direction of the bank’s in-mall branch. His eyes were on Kaffia.
     I waited till he got close then I stepped out from the benches and stood right in front of him. “Hey, I just came from Poster Roaster.” My voice was all gasping and rough, which probably made my claim sound more real. “Two girls just ripped off a stack of posters from the boy-band bin.” 
     He blinked at me a couple times, but mainly kept his eyes on Kaffia, shifting around me to get to her. I moved a little to the left to stay between him and Kaffia, and I pointed in the direction the two girls would have gone if I hadn’t invented them there on the spot.
     It sounded really lame once I got the words out, but it stopped the guard for a few seconds. 
     “I’m not with mall security. Try the information booth. Excuse me,” he said, stepped around me militarily and continued in a straight path toward Kaffia at the kiosk.     
     I didn’t know what to do then. Should I leave? If I didn’t go to the information booth the guard might think I was involved in whatever Kaffia was doing. I turned around and walked backward slowly, watching Kaffia. She didn’t look up at me once. She shrugged, smiling in her sundress, and appeared in every way to be an innocent fourteen-year-old girl who “couldn’t get this thing working.” I heard her say in a very girlish tone, “I don’t know what’s wrong with it. I usually see this like get forty dollars out thing.” The guard pointed down the mall, directing her toward the bank, and she walked off inconvenienced.          
     She strode right past me and headed for the bank. I followed her a ways back. She used one of the ATMs there, withdrew some cash and went out to the parking lot. She took me out to lunch. I wasn’t going to argue. This girl’s dangerous. 
     On the other hand, there’s an exciting side that makes her…different. While any other girl I had ever known talked about movies and books and school, Kaffia chatted about Local Exchange Routing Guides, class 4 switches, 16-bit math—“keying in hex”—and a bunch of stuff that went by so fast that she lost me for fifteen minute intervals. 
     I think she thought I was engrossed, but I was really trying to figure out when she was about to change subjects. My only hope of picking up the conversation was at the next transition, when she stopped talking about SNMP hacks and went into something that involved some other acronym whose meaning would elude me. 
     About halfway through the food she said, “Oh, happy birthday! It’s tomorrow but I probably won’t see you till Monday.”
     A wad of fries stuck in my mouth, I nodded, chewed through it and said, “Thanks.” I didn’t ask how she knew it was my birthday.
     On the way home Kaffia put her hand on my arm. I froze, instantly aware of her skin against mine. 
     “Thanks for holding up security. Girls stealing posters. That was very well done.”
     I shrugged like that’s the sort of thing I do all the time.
     We were back in North Hampton before I got up the nerve to ask her what that was all about.
     “It’s my bank. I have an account there. My whole family, my parents, my sister and brother all have accounts. I heard about an exploit using their kiosk machines and just wanted to see if it’s true, and how far I could get.” 
     I rode my board home, rolling down Ocean at an easy pace. I kept shaking my head, puzzled. I thought I had a fairly clear picture of Kaffia’s character, the kind of person she was. She’s aloof. She didn’t seem to want any friends. But why did she pick me to go with her? She hardly knew me. Why not one of her better known acquaintances? 

 
 
 
 
11
Straff’s Plea
 
 
IT WAS ALREADY IN Kaffia’s brachial vein, digging through the inner lining, endothelium and into the smooth muscle tissue surrounding the vessel. It was a bloodborne nanomachine, so tiny that individual cells towered over it, some of them the size of office buildings to a child on a city sidewalk. It knew it was one of hundreds or maybe even thousands of nanomachines inside the human female. It didn’t know how m