The Blue Nowhere Read Online Free PDF

each other atop a mountain at a ski resort, dancing at their wedding. Other pictures showed the couple with their two children. Vacations, soccer practice, Christmas, Easter.
    You know, I’d ask you over for dinner or something but this new company’s got me working like crazy. . . . Probably better to wait till after the family gets here anyway, you know. Kathy’s really the social director. . . . And a lot better cook than me. Okay, you take care now.
    And the neighbors would pass him the welcoming wine or cookies or begonias and return home, never guessing that, in the best spirit of creative social engineering, the entire scene had been as fake as a movie set.
    Like the pictures he’d shown Lara Gibson these snapshots had been created on his computer: his face had replaced a male model’s, Kathy’s was a generic female face, morphed from a model in Self. The kids had come from a Vogue Bambini. The house itself was a façade too; the living room and hall were the only fully furnished rooms (to fool people who came to the door.) In the bedroom was a cot and lamp. In the dining room—Phate’s office—were a table, lamp, two laptop computers and an office chair. In the basement . . . well, the basement contained a few other things—but they definitely weren’t for public view.
    If need be, and he knew it was a possibility, he could walk out the door immediately and leave everything behind. All his important possessions—his serious hardware, the computer antiquities he collected, his ID card machine, the supercomputer parts he bought and sold to make his living—were in a warehouse miles away. And there was nothing here that would lead police to that location.
    He now walked into the dining room and sat down at the table. He turned on a laptop.
    The screen came to life, a C: prompt flashed on the screen and, with the appearance of that blinking symbol, Phate rose from the dead.
    Who do you want to be?
    Well, at the moment, he was no longer Jon Patrick Holloway or Will Randolph or Warren Gregg or James L. Seymour or any of the other characters he’d created. He was now Phate. No longer the blond, five-foot-ten character of slight build, floating aimlessly among three-dimensional houses and office buildings and stores and airplanes and concrete strips of highway and brown lawns chain-link fences semiconductor plants strip malls pets and people people people people. . . .
    This was his reality, the world inside his monitor.
    He keyed some commands and with an excited churning in his groin he heard the rising and falling whistle of his modem’s sensual electronic handshake (most real hackers would never use dog-slow modems and telephone lines like this, rather than a direct connection, to get online. But Phate had to compromise; speed was far less important than being able to stay mobile and hide his tracks through millions of miles of telephone lines around the world).
    After he was connected to the Net he checked his e-mail. He would have opened any letters from Shawn right away but there were none; the others he’d read later. He exited the mail reader and then keyed in another command. A menu popped up on his screen.
    When he and Shawn had written the software for Trapdoor last year he’d decided that, even though no one else would be using it, he’d make the menu user-friendly—simply because this is what you did when you were a brilliant codeslinger.
    TRAPDOOR
    Main Menu
    1. Do you want to continue a prior session?
    2. Do you want to create/open/edit a background file?
    3. Do you want to find a new target?
    4. Do you want to decode/decrypt a password or text?
    5. Do you want to exit to the system?
    He scrolled down to 3 and hit the ENTER key.
    A moment later the Trapdoor program politely asked:
    Please enter the e-mail address of the target.
    From memory he typed a screen name and hit ENTER. Within ten seconds he was connected to someone else’s machine—in effect, looking over the