18-01-42

He calls me Rich Kid.  As for instance when I got curious and went into the ATF files on the Kal-63.  I skimmed through thousands of pages of documents, site scanned the pictures, noticed one of the explosion images that looked like it had been touched, stripped the mark, recalibrated the scan lines, discovered an alternate mark buried in the pixel history, and sat there with my mouth hanging open staring at the text field, "Hey Rich Kid-late to the party again?"

At first I was sure he was faking-just a regular member of the elite spitting up lingo to cover the fact he couldn't spell.  But a ripple went out claiming that Sotheby's was going to be auctioning a genuine VMS, and I figured he'd be there inside 6 hours to see if it was for real.  He showed as predicted, but instead of following him in, I tapped into the bid pipe and placed a mess of sniffers.

He was cracking Sotheby's from the Terminal Room of the Ipswich Public Library, running EARTHNET-FREAKING-22.

You can plug a keyboard into EarthNet 22.

The VMS went to a wealthy collector in Japan, supposedly a lover of archaic technologies, for 675K.  It disappeared en route, dropping invisibly through the supposedly bulletproof UPS-EX shipping network.  Their records claimed it had been delivered to my house.

I nearly had a heart attack.
 
Thank God I had access to their records and got an early warning.  Even so, I had like an hour before boiling oil started pouring down my com lines from UPS-EX security.  The shunt fired it onto Mom's system, thank God.  By the time her assistant started fielding incoming at the office, I had the wall panel in my room open and was switching out the console plate for a voice analyzer I keep around for this kind of emergency.  All the time thinking: if I go down, what's going to happen to Tracy and Roddy and GK and the gang?  How sloppy have I been?  how many people might end up in jail because he wanted to show me who the big dog was?

I was swearing and white and shaking, furious and scared out of my mind, almost forgot to tweak the dates on the analyzer, couldn't eat, couldn't sleep that night.  UPS-EX Security fell on Dad like an anvil until Mom figured out what was going on and bailed us out.  She explained that her job at the Bureau made us frequent targets for hackers, and finally they bought it.  (This is actually true.  I learned a ton of cuts from Mom, her showing me how to keep our power on and our credit rating unslashed.  That was before I became one of Them.  You know what they say about the Preacher's kid...)

Two days later, GK told me all my mail had been bouncing with the tag "Ta, RK.  Rich Kids who peep @ the keyole get black eys"

It's not my fault I was born comfortably middle-class, dammit.  Sometimes I have fantasies of breaking him down.  I've got progs he's never dreamed of.  But the truth is, he couldn't care less about that:  and if we ever went head to head, he'd leave me looking like I'd been carved up with a broken beer bottle.  Might take down GK and the rest of my cell just by accident; I don't think he gives a damn about politics, he's not a guy for causes.  I don't think he gives a damn about anything at all.  That's what makes him so dangerous: he seems to have nothing to lose.

So when he jeers at me, I just shut up and take it, because that's the smart thing to do.

The smart, safe, middle-class thing to do.