<b>Roo'd</b>

# Roo'd

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# Chapter #4

Tony pulled off the helmet and smiled at Fede, his crooked grin bringing back 16 years of brotherhood all in a rush.

“What’s up, bro?” he asked. Before Fede could answer he called out to the black man running the tattoo machine, “Hey Mil, this here’s my brother! Came all the way down from the house-parks to see me.”

“’Come down here to stare at Cass’s ass is what he did” said Mil without turning around. He punched a button on the control box sitting next to the fat man. The machine began to hum, and the fat man groaned.

Tony steepled his fingers, his hands still encased in the thick waldo gloves. He watched Fede for a moment. Fede watched back. What do you say to your estranged brother after two years of nothing?

“Why’d you leave, Tony?” he asked, the words out of his mouth before his mind had a chance to think about them.

Tony’s smiled widened. “Tonx” he said.

“What?”

“Tonx. Call me Tonx. Tony died a long time ago. I’m Tonx now. Changed the name when I left MIT.”

“’Tonx’?” asked Fede, “Why Tonx?”

Tony’s smile deepened. “Don’t remember? When I was a kid I could never get the hang of writing a ‘y’. I always wrote it as an ‘x’. Teachers used to give me hell, for a while. Called me ‘Tonx’ to make fun of me, to try to shame me into playing by the rules. So I did, for while. Now I don’t. So... Tonx.”

Fede forced a laugh, his chuckle sounding fake even to his own ears. “That’s cool, Tony — Tonx. That’s cool.”

Tonx’s smile widened and he pushed a strand of greasy black hair behind one ear, a thick malachite talon arching from the lobe. He jumped out of the chair and grabbed a big black thermoelectric hoody off its back. Pulling it over his sleeveless white tee he shuffled by the edge of the scratched metal desk.

“Let’s get some lunch,” he said to Fede, “we’ve got some catching up to do.”

Two hours later Fede was full of beer and stir-fry, picking little crunchy bits of fried tofu out of his teeth with the splintered remains of his disposable chopstick. He was regaling Tony — Tonx, he reminded himself — with tales of his ’sploits, explaining some of the new code he was seeing in the newsgroups these days, how cool it all was. The beer made his head swim. He’d only been drunk a few times and hadn’t liked it, but his brother had ordered for them and he had been afraid of looking stupid. Tonx was listening to everything he said with the same rapt attention Fede remembered, nodding his head as he shoveled down his stir-fry.

“So then I got the idea of forcing the compile on the captured machine. I mean, where better? You’re already leeching cycles off them for the scans and port postings and everything else. Everybody’s got a connection to at least one or two peer-to-peer networks, and this way you can anonymously pull down the libraries you need. It adds additional routes to the data vectors they have to backtrack, and allows you to control the programming by modularizing it.”

“But doesn’t your initial access point have to stay open?” asked Tonx.

“No. That’s the beauty of it. The compile is set to use the same memory space as the access logs. So the initial compile erases your tracks right from the start, and uses the same execution levels as your logging daemons. It reads like a port scan being logged, or firewall intrusion attempt by some clueless newbie.”

“Clever” conceded Tonx. “Very clever.” He belched and leaned back, folding his hands over his belly. He looked over Fede’s shoulder into the middle distance and ran his tongue over his teeth, working loose a piece of sweet-n-sour pork. “Good to see you’ve been keeping busy.”

“Busy?” asked Fede, “It’s the hottest fucking virus that’s ever hit the ’Nets, and I’ve almost completely reverse engineered it. That’s more than busy, man.”

Tonx put his plastic sandals on the edge of the table and wiggled his toes for a moment. “Got to get rid of these babies,” he muttered to himself. He looked up at Fede, and shrugged.

“What does that mean?” asked Fede.

“What about your regular coursework?” Tonx asked.

“Oh. That’s fine. It’s a hassle, learning all the legacy shit, is all. I don’t see the point if you’re not going to use any of it. Nobody these days does their own garbage collection, and any modern language can handle all the pointer stuff for you.”

“Seems kind of counterproductive spending all your free time reverse engineering viruses if what you’re really after is getting a spot in a corp” said Tonx. “I mean, doesn’t security development have more to do with prevention than attack?”

“That’s stupid,” said Fede. “Of course you have to understand the virus-writing side.”

“So...?” Tonx drawled, leaving the question hanging in the air.

Fede realized he was sitting on the edge of his chair, one elbow in a nest of napkins filthy with stir-fry and soy sauce. He jerked his arm back and slid fully onto his chair.

Tony had taught him to code, gotten him hooked on the underground newsgroups and chat rooms using their Dad’s pass codes to get around the “Parental control” lock filters that came with their school-issue laptops. That was back when his Dad was still around, or as close to around as he’d ever been. Tony had steered Fede through the basic ’Net protocols, started him on his first shell scripts, gotten him involved. It was because of Tony that Fede had developed any interest in coding at all, and although Tony had ended up going for biologicals he’d never, ever, stopped pushing Fede to produce the best, tightest, cleanest code he could. And now he was asking him why.

“What are you after, Tony?” he asked.

“Tonx, Fede. And I’m just asking if you’re really enjoying what you’re doing, where you’re going.”

Fede picked up a rumpled but clean napkin from the little bamboo basket on the table next to him and wiped off his elbow.

“Of course I am. I’m even getting into some of the undergrounds at the big schools. If I can finish reversing this virus I’ve got a contact that’ll sponsor a full nym for me. I can start posting some of my questions without being marked as a noob.”

“Huh” said Tonx. A group of asian schoolgirls in uniforms from a corporate-sponsored school swirled by, giggles and yells and the rapid pattern of their talk rising then dimming in the empty air of the shop. Suddenly Tonx stood up and flashed a paycard over the reader embedded in the table. “It’s on me,” he said.

They walked out of the shop through battered translucent plastic slats hanging from the doorway, out into the twilight. The sky was a rich, dark blue in the gaps between buildings, and a couple of lone clouds overhead took up the yellowed color from the city lights below.

Tonx stepped down onto the street and waved a hand. “Come on, I got to get back to the shop.”

Fede zipped up his jacket and followed, his eyebrows pulling together as he watched the heels of Tonx’s black converse knock-offs rise and fall in front of him. After a moment he jogged forward and caught up, dodging past a pair of old ladies carrying some dead leafy thing to walk next to his brother.

“Why’d you leave?” he asked again. “Why’d you leave MIT?”

Tonx unsealed a flap on the hem of his hoody and stroked the controls for a moment. Fiber optic threads started glowing around the inside of his hood, illuminating his face in a dim red light. He pushed back an errant lock of dark hair and leaned towards Fede as they walked. “Why’d I leave MIT?

“I left because great people aren’t great because to their education, or the school they went to or the toys their parents or companies or curriculum buys them. I left because people become great by doing what they love to do.”

He leaned away from Fede, the red light fading as the heating elements in his hoody ramped up to full capacity.

“I love biotech, man, not school.”

Fede snorted, loudly. “That’s fucking stupid,” he said. “You couldn’t get better access to biotech than at MIT.”

Tonx stopped and placed his hand on an aluminum push panel set into a door on the side of a building. The soft hum of machinery cut through the street noise and the door clicked, then shuddered.

“Okay” he said. He looked thoughtful for a moment. “How’s this then: I left because I didn’t need to be there anymore to do what I wanted. To achieve what I wanted to achieve.”

He looked away from Fede, off down the street, his face hidden in the shadow of his hoody.

“My goals changed,” he said.

He pushed into the crumbling hallway beyond, yellowed fluorescents flickering to life through metal gratings overhead.

“You coming?” he asked.

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