09 Private Lives by Bill McCay

Author:Bill McCay [McCay, Bill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

11

After an all-nighter on the Net, Matt Hunter sprawled in his computer-link couch, feeling more dead than alive. Carrying bricks on a construction site would probably be more physically demanding. But while his body had lain here, getting the occasional stimulus to twitch a muscle and keep him from turning into a literal couch potato, Matt had been at the nerve-racking occupation of spoofing computer systems into disgorging data.

From the initial contact until he safely got away, he’d had to dodge various security programs and a couple of live systems managers. Matt felt limper than a cheap wash-rag after somebody had wrung it out and hung it up to dry. He literally wondered if he had the strength to get up, go to the bathroom, and throw some cold water on his face.

Worst of all, his whole effort had been for nothing. Matt’s first move had been to consult the city directory, checking off every address which might overlook the corner he wanted. Then he had to search and see if any of those addresses had security cameras. Then came the job of hacking into the appropriate building systems and getting a look at the data for the date in question.

The result? Not one of the cameras actually recorded the corner of G Street and Wilson Avenue. A couple of yards off here, half a block off there. But if there was an angle that might show a waiting James Winters on that corner, he hadn’t found it. Kind of weird, that. He’d have bet that it wasn’t possible to find an unrecorded inch in that neighborhood.

Matt tried to get up and groaned.

This is what I get for breaking the law, he thought.

School would be coming all too soon. He’d probably walk the halls of Bradford Academy like some sort of zombie, one of the living dead….

Dead…Matt closed his eyes again. It wasn’t worth wasting the time to get up and go to bed. He could just lie here, doze for an hour or so…

At that moment his wallet decided to attack him from his back pocket.

Matt blinked, trying to push his tired mind to make sense of what was going on. Oh—the vibration was his wallet-phone….

He dug the wallet out, switched to the foilpack keypad, and switched it to phone format.

“Hello?” His voice was more like a groan.

“Matt?” Even considering the wallet-phone’s inherent shortcomings, the voice on this connection was incredibly tinny. It took Matt a moment to figure out who was calling.

Finally, “Squirt?” Matt squinted over for a look at his clock and flinched in horror. “Do you know what time it is? What are you doing up?”

“I—um—I was hacking,” Mark Gridley confessed.

Well, I know how that feels, Matt thought.

Mark rushed on. “Sorry. I know this must sound kind of scraggy. I’m still on the Net. Figured this would be quieter than disconnecting and calling from a phone.”

Matt could understand that. The vidphones didn’t exactly ring selectively. And a parent awakened before daybreak was not a happy parent. His own folks wouldn’t be pleased to discover that he’d spent the entire night out on the Net.

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