Society Entry for Blender 34 The words are: hacker/ assembling a stereo/ supermarket Story by Skrubly Brian had been living for the past six days on three packages of ramen and half a bottle of soycafe. He weighed roughly a hundred pounds and had forgotten to eat in the past thirty hours as well. His hair was long by dint of the fact that he never got it cut, and it tended to brush the tops of his legs when he crouched over the keyboard that was placed on his coffee table. He upended the soycafe bottle and a warm bland liquid filled his mouth. Reluctantly he swallowed, allowing himself to take his eyes from the place they had been focused two feet in front of his head. It was time to go out. He broke the keyboard in half, flipping over the lefthanded chunk and enabling the accordian functions with a flip of a switch. The three amber lights flickered as it performed its self test. Although many people used ocular implants as a mainstay, Brian preferred a flatscreen LCD. He shut the screen off and enabled his implants that rested right above his nose and projected the images onto the back of his retinas. The sunglasses he wore when he went out looked more than outlandish on his fragile face; he wore them not so much as an affectation as to disguise the fact that he was wearing video implants. Once he had been so absorbed in what he was doing he had walked into a lightpost; the sunglasses also enabled him to say that he was blind. In many cases, he was, although the minicam mounted on his belt could pick out images up to a half mile away and magnify them, so it didn't matter terribly much. He rose, and the white skin of his legs flashed in the dusty stream of sunlight that peeked through the crack in his window insulation. He pulled on a pair of rumpled pants that had the processor strapped to their right side. Once he was together, the half-keyboard hung on his left hip and the processor rested on the righthand side. The keyboard plugged into the processor which in turn plugged into the jack on his left side that handled his video implants output. After pushing his hair back behind his shoulders, he set out. The street faded into a ghost shape as his optics started to display his desktop. Although many other people in his profession chose to use a strictly graphical interface, Brian chose a mixture of both graphics and fast executing scripts. There was a small table in the upper left hand corner of his vision that displayed a series of numbers pertaining to his particular place in the net at any given time. He could read the numbers, in a way. Not just their numerical value, mind you, but he formed a rough picture in his head as to what the numbers said at different intervals. You couldn't always trust what the computer was telling you, he reasoned. His current project was Yanaka Incorporated, a company that manufactured low-end consumer electronics; cheap vidscreens, ROM players, and stereo systems. They had reneged on a loan of 5.6 billion that they received from the Hiratsu Syndicate, his current employers. Although the matter had initially been negotiated in person with the appropriate measures taken, it had fallen into limbo after half of Hiratsu's security team had been turned into a pile of kevlar vests, assault rifles, and red slush. So they had turned to him. He had negotiated a 30% raise in comission (now resting at 43.5 million per job, plus expenses) as well as a nice severance package should anything go wrong. He turned the corner and walked into Cho's Supermarket, which was the closest market to his flat that carried Mr. Lee's Won Ton's as well as Tsongbori Devil Sauce. As he walked past the lobster tank he began his cursory approach of the Yanaka banks. His links were steady and the carrier was good (5 gigabit cellular connects do not come cheap) so he decided to dive in. He activated his Hellraiser script and investigated the current prices of ramen. Hellraiser came back after he had set the ramen down and a seek three error code; it was odd in the sense that a seek three would indicate that Yanaka was running something less than Amkey/3, which must be wrong. No one ran Amkey/3 anymore. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mike was smiling. He had to smile because he was being grilled about plant #4 in the assembly string along the coast of Singapore, which was showing some weaknesses in production lately. "Weaknesses in production?" roared Mr. Salva "You call being three weeks behind schedule a _weakness_?" "There have been some unexpected.... delays." Mike smiled weakly. "Listen, if you don't get this plant up to spec Yanaka himself is going to come down here and have all our asses in a sling." It was at that point that things took a slight turn for the worse. The Voptcom III mini that controlled the plants operations died. Just stopped. The power light just kept blinking on and off, and the assembly line stopped. The workers looked up from the factory floor to the booth where the two men were standing. "Oh, Jesus." whispered Salva, half to himself. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Brian had just walked out the autmatic doors when his netmonitor reported a success. He hadn't even had a copy of Forcebolt active; it was so old that he had archived it along with some other utilities from three years ago. He couldn't understand why in the hell that Yanaka would be running Amkey/3. It was too easy. Either that or someone was a really hopeless fuckup. A vidphone call started to blink in the center of his vision, marking it as priority one. Mr. Hiratsu appeared on the screen, his face outlined by the delicate woodpaneling of his office. "I must extend my sincerest thanks and congratulations on a job well done." he said, smiling. "You're welcome. Direct deposit, right?" he asked. "Indeed. Once again, thank you." he said. Hiratsu's image clicked off. He slid the keycard through the reader on the side of his door and pushed it open with his foot; his small gray cat meowed at the sight of food. "I like you too. Now get down off the counter." ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Mike was not smiling anymore. He was kneeling, watching the birds pick at trash on the bay. He shivered and wondered when they were going to give him his clothes back, and then when the man with the pistol stepped in front of him and he knew that he wasn't ever going to get anything. "No more fuckups." the man said, and everything went black.