<b>Roo'd</b>

# Roo'd

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# Chapter #8

Fede went home just before Tonx started practice. He caught the train out of downtown and made it to the housing park just as the last bus rolled out. No one was in. His Mom had left a voice memo on the fridge’s comp that she was out with Bark, that he was treating her to a night on the town. He took a pizza out of the freezer, realized the ancient appliance was filthy. Knew that it had always been filthy. Once his pizza was hot he took it from the microwave and, as an afterthought, grabbed a beer from the back of the fridge. The beginning of the day seemed far away, a distant history as he rolled down the hall from the kitchen to his room.

He fell into his chair and swiveled around. The place seemed suddenly tiny, childish. Charts of old scripting languages were tacked to the wall, yellow stickies with IP addresses for long-gone servers peppering their edges. His desk lamp leaned crooked against one corner, its spring broken, hinges splinted with duct tape. The stacks of books on the edge of his desk sat leaden, unopenable. They were all entrance exam aids. All of them.

Fede finished his pizza and clicked off the lamp. He crawled up onto the top bunk and lay staring at the ceiling. The Beowulf cluster in the bunk below hummed quietly, the tiny red and yellow LEDs casting dim shadows against the wall across from him. Fede sighed gently and sat up before pulling off his legs. He took a jar of silicone lube from a crack between the mattress and the bed and applied it to his prosthetics’ vulnerable joints, his fingers working deftly in the dark. When he was done he set them aside and massaged a tube of gel over his stumps, kneading the thickened tissue there back into pliability. There was nothing but the sound of his breathing, the hum of the fans in the machines beneath him.

Tonx’s idea was amazing, was the coolest bio hack he’d ever heard of, and Fede wanted in on it. He knew he could pull together a virus that could get them the computing power they needed, knew it like a cold hard lump inside his head. A certainty that this chance was his.

And right there beside it was the fear; if he took this on he’d be out of school, dropped off his fast track to the big schools like a kitten from a car on the interstate. Bailing out for no good reason would be noted, his sudden absence ascribed to drugs use or, even worse, an inability to cope with the stress. Even if he came back he’d have to struggle against it.

Fede realized he was breathing fast, stopped and pulled down some deep breaths.

He could always claim medical problems. Say he had a growth spurt that landed him in a hospital for a while doing physical therapy to learn new legs. It had happened before and he’d always come right back.

But this was different, he knew. They would be watching more closely, this time. But still...

Fede finished rubbing gel into his stumps and lay back, pulling his goggles down over his eyes. Notes filled his vision, sketches of a virus that would take the DNA map Tonx was to find from some ectomorph and check it against a map of the human brain. They’d decided to go for broke; if it worked they would need some serious value to sell off the results, and knowing how to make a dog smart wasn’t going to cut it. Not when you’d taken over China to find out how. Not when you’d virused the world.

Fede smiled, almost giggled. He pulled himself up on his elbows and flipped his goggles up, staring into the dark. In the dim light the stacks of books, the piles of notes on exams and dry half-dead languages, the trash from the last few years of his life crouched chaotically on his desk. He fell back onto the bed and laughed before yanking the goggles back on, the rubber straps catching the hairs on the back of his neck.

He was just starting to put together some basic processing modules when they chimed, lightly. It took a minute for Fede to realize what it was, the reaching fingers of the sound pawing at his cerebellum, pulling him back from the program. He fumbled to open the session, watched the chat client come up:

%<Tonx> What up, ltlman?

$<> Working. You get something?

%<Tonx> We got lucky.

%<Tonx> This channel secure?

$<> Should B. BRB, let me C yr con.

%<Tonx> Ok, I use,..<@#$..#$><As.%%:"OO9888>>>>>>

-***-

Fede’s hands flew over the chord as he rerouted their session through several secure servers, set up a one-time certificate to use, and re-initialized. Garbage characters flew across his retinas, randomness flooding his buffers to throw off any listeners. Their chat session connected again:

PKI HANDSHAKE COMPLETE

SSH CERT. VERIFIED

IP 222.19.13.73 VERIFIED

IPSEC CONNECTION INITIATED

<$CONNECTION re-established>

$<> Looks good.

%<Tonx> ok. Listen. I have a contact in France. High-end corp doing undrgrnd work on big gambit. Just got ordered to dump three years of work because he wasn’t meeting their bottom line. Was told to start working on dead boring plastic-eating bacteria. Wants to sell out and get out. Will give up whole genome map for Pacific Octopus in exchange for our getting him out.

$<> Octopus is good?

%<Tonx> Highly endomorphic. Vry vry smrt; not well understood, but definitely fits. French contact has mapped and used tissue >2 yrs will supply working notes also.

$<> LOL Fuckyah! Perfect.

%<Tonx> He may know how to stop cancer’s detection using squid’s endomorphic tissue w/stem cell sequence; he pioneered the approach. Has same prob. as us — can’t compute match for final recombinant.

$<> Solve both prob at once. Neat.

%<Tonx> We’d be stealing him from a major corp; they’ve got armed forces. We will have to produce fast to publicize results before they find him.

Fede felt something catch in his throat. His eyes unfocused. Somewhere, millimeters from his cornea, tiny vibrating pieces of glass tried to force the image of a blinking cursor onto the backs of his eyeballs. This was not what they had talked about. This was dangerous, suddenly. But if they pulled this off, Fede realized, they would own patentable rights on a way to increase human intelligence. The owners of this technology would become more than human. The world would change.

Fede sucked in a breath, hard. His heart hammered in his ears. He blinked, saw Tonx had written more:

%<Tonx> Can you do it in 2 wks?

%<Tonx> I guess this means no school 4 U. 8-)

The cursor blinked in Fede’s eye. Something inside him tightened, hardened, released. He could do this. He would do this.

$<> 2 wks no prob w/out sleep.

%<Tonx> Excellent. It’d be better if you were local — can you move in over here?

The Beowulf cluster hummed beneath him, the subtle vibration an indication it had started its nightly log cleanup routines. The musty smell from the old tech in the room sat heavy in Fede’s nostrils. The apartment he had known all his life sprawled still around him, lifeless. He was done here, he realized suddenly. Despite all his work there wasn’t anything for him to stay for.

$<> Ok.

%<Tonx> Come over tomorrow. Room will B tight; Poulpe wants 2 vst.

$<> Poulpe?

%<Tonx> Poulpe is contact; means octopus in French.

$<Tonx> He needs backdoor 2 undrgrnd tight & now. We’ll disappear him. You do the data.

$<> What r rsks?

%<Tonx> LOL. many. No pain no gain, ltlman. wlcm 2 undrgrnd.

</CONNECTION terminated>

</IPSEC connection terminated>

IP 222.19.13.73 traceroute/nmap STARTED

</PKI handshake released>

Fede cancelled the trace; he’d already followed it when Tonx started the call. His senses filled the room, the size of this choice a weight heavy on his chest. There was no cooler task than this; it made dissecting public viruses look like a crossword puzzle. But it was dangerous. Corporate extractions were no joke. And he’d be set back a semester, easy, if he ever made it back to school at all.

He laughed, nervous, realized that a semester of school was the least of his worries, now.

It was a long time until he slept.

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