Man Made Boy Read Online Free PDF Page B

out there in over twenty years. I’ll bet the humans have changed a lot.”
    She nodded once, slowly, but didn’t say anything else.
    There were a lot of creatures in the company, like Shaun and his crew, who just thought of humans as the audience who paid the bills. There were some, like Charon and my dad, who were comfortable with humans but distrusted them. And there were some, like my mom, who totally hated them. I couldn’t really blame her, after what Victor Frankenstein and other humans had done to her and my dad over the years. But I knew it meant she would never understand why I was so interested in them and their world.

4

Magic Numbers
    MY ROOM WAS crammed with computers. Not all of them worked anymore, and of those that did, not all of them worked well. But I never threw any of them out, because inevitably, Mom or I would find some use for them, either as salvage for spare parts for another computer or as something completely different, like the remote-controlled spotlights for The Show. There wasn’t much else in my room except an unmade bed with camo sheets and an old wooden dresser stuffed with clothes.
    I took off my hoodie and nestled down into the heaping mass of electronics. I rolled up my sleeves, then tugged the stitches loose on the undersides of my forearms. I lifted up flaps of skin to expose USB ports just below each of my wrists. Then I pulled out two USB cables that were connected to the back of my favorite computer and plugged them into my wrists. My hands were strong, but my fingers were too thick and clumsy to type with any precision. A few years ago I realized that I could type much faster if I just bypassed my fingers completely. So I wrote a program that decoded neurological impulses and converted them into digital commands. Then Mom helped me install some custom USB ports that connected directly to my nervous system atthe wrists. So all I had to do was think about typing, and the text appeared on the screen.
    Well, it would if I
had
a screen.
    I pulled a DVI cable from the same computer. I lifted my hair up in the back and screwed the cable into the jack on the back of my head. When I first started using computers, I wore out eyes really quickly staring at monitors all the time. Eyes were relatively easy to replace, but hard to find in good condition. So, since things worked out so well with my USB hand bypasses, I just had my mom install a DVI jack at the base of my cortex and bypassed my eyes, too. Of course, it wasn’t nearly as easy as the USB bypasses. The jack installation took mom several hours to complete. And writing the conversion program was a lot more complex because I had to translate flat, digital binary into straight-up rich analog. It took forever to code, and even once it was done I still had to tweak the color calibration on a regular basis. Still, it saved Ruthven a lot of trips to the morgue for fresh eyes. And, you know, it was just cool that I could interface directly with my computer.
    I booted up the PC tower, then leaned back, rested my arms on my thighs, and closed my eyes. I could “see” the computer display in my head and, with just the tiniest twitch of muscles in my forearms, I logged on to the network.
    As soon as I started my IRC client, I got slammed with a ton of messages. I guess you could say I was kind of famous within the hacker community. But I wasn’t one of those lame identity theft crackers. Sure, when I was a kid I liked to show off and mess with stuff. But true hacking isn’t about stealing credit card numbers and taking down websites. It’s about figuring out how something works—software, firmware, networks, hardware,whatever—and then using that knowledge to improve it, to make it better than originally intended. All technological evolution comes out of hacking. It’s the pure pursuit of making things more awesome.
    s1zzl3: sup, bϴy
    poxd: yo, b0y
    surelee: where you been?
    b0y: whazzup, d00ds? I been livin’ in meatspace too