Cyberpunk Read Online Free PDF Page B

into the store.
    I love the feel of Martin’s Micros. It’s a funky, dim-’n’-cluttered
    kind of place: heavy square gear piled in haphazard clutters on the floor,
    making it a true challenge to move in any straight line; big tin racks of
    old half-dead Cyberspace decks and i786 motherboards reaching right
    up to the ceiling; light filtering in low and angular through the vertical
    slits in the front window ghetto armor. When I’m in Martin’s I always
    get this feeling that if I can just look in the right corner or blow the dust
    off the right old circuit board, I’ll find some incredible treasure —or
    maybe a couple of cackling cybergremlins tearing the legs off screaming
    IC chips and munching on their silicon hearts. Georgie says going into
    Martin’s Micros is kind of like poking around in the ultimate techie
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    ©1982, 1998 Bruce Bethke
    grandparent’s attic, and he should know, he’s got three living
    grandfathers.
    We threaded into the store, stepping gingerish around the floor junk,
    pausing now and again to poke at some particular interesting piece of
    wreckage on the shelves like maybe to see if it was alive and would bite.
    By and by, we made it to the island of light way in the back of the store.
    Martin was sitting there, in front of his customized hodgepodge
    monster of a personal workstation, hulking over the keyboard. He sort of
    looked up. “Oh, hiya Mikey. Lisa, Georgie. Rayno.” We all nodded, not
    smiling, not looking right at him, being total derzky. “Nice to see you
    again.” He frowned at the screen, punched in something else, then really
    looked up. “What can I do for you today?”
    “Just looking,” Rayno said.
    “Well, that’s free.” Martin turned back to the tube, poked a few
    more keys. “ Damn .” he said to the terminal.
    “What’s the problem?” Lisa asked.
    “The problem is me ,” Martin said. “I got this vertical package I’m
    ‘sposed to be customizing for a client, but it keeps dying the hot photon
    death and I can’t grok where it’s at.” Martin talks funny, sometimes.
    “You mean it nukes itself?” George asked.
    “Yeah.” Martin dug his thick fingers into his bushy black beard and
    gave his chin a good scratch. “But not in the way I expect. I mean, it had
    this really aggressive copy protect, y’know? Whenever you logged into
    CityNet it sent off a little agent program that sniffed around, looked for
    other copies of itself. If the agent found another copy with the same
    serial number it came back, encrypted your system files, and then
    phoned the FBI copyright hotline.”
    Martin stopped scratching, sudden, and made with a wide, toothy
    smile. “Which is all perfectly correct and legal software behavior, of
    course. My client just needs to keep a—uh, offsite backup of the
    software. Yeah.”
    We all nodded. Offsite backup. Yep. Sure. Darned if I don’t keep a
    few of those myself.
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    ©1982, 1998 Bruce Bethke
    Martin turned back to his workstation, took his hand out of his
    beard, laid it on the CityLink box. “I finally beat the copy protect by
    trapping the agent in a null buffer and flushing it to the Phantom Zone.
    But now I’m trying to make some other mods to the software, and
    nothing I do seems to work.” He turned, looked at me, his thick bushy
    eyebrows all knitted together in a frown. “Mikey, you don’t suppose
    they put some kind of fascist code integrity checker in there, do you?”
    Rayno pushed in between me and Martin. “Rewind. Let’s start from
    the beginning. What’s this thing supposed to do?”
    Martin looked at Rayno and shrugged. “You really want to know?
    It’s boring as public television.” Rayno nodded.
    Martin nodded, too. “Okay.” He turned back to his workstation and
    started closing down files and popping up windows. “Kids, what we’ve
    got here is a complete real estate investment forecasting system. The
    whole future-values-in-current-dollars bit: