The First Rule of Ten Read Online Free PDF

of writing Yeshe and Lobsang steadied me, and I’d never broken the habit.
    Reading my latest news, Lobsang would no doubt scowl a little, sure that I was once again displaying too much obedience to my flighty mind. “Always unsettled, like a hummingbird,” he used to scold. Yeshe? His only wish would be that this change continue to deepen my understanding of the Dharma, of the way things are.
    I closed my eyes and let the different parts of my body relax. My eyelids, jaw, neck, and shoulders. I let my attention circle the faint throb of pain in my temple. Moved past my chest and belly, to my thighs, feet, hands. Peace and spaciousness spread through my limbs like thick honey.
    I winced, stabbed by a familiar anxiety. What if I fail? What if I am making a huge mistake? What if my father is right about me, that I am too lazy and unfocused to ever amount to anything?
    I surrounded the thoughts with affection and let them float away.
    Brought my attention back to the rise and fall of my breath.
    I gave myself six months. A lot can happen in six months, right?
    As it turned out, a lot can happen in 24 hours.

C HAPTER 4
    “Hey, boss. Any luck?” I heard from outside my kitchen window, where Mike was fiddling with my newly installed data line.
    I clicked the connection icon on my computer screen, one more time. Nothing.
    “Nothing!” I called.
    “Well, scroty-balls to that!”
    As usual, Mike was an endless source of new expressions.
    He was soon at my side. His fingers flew across my keyboard. Waves of incomprehensible numbers and symbols appeared and dissolved on the screen. He surfed through the data, nodding to himself and mumbling. He sat back. I could see him mentally dialing down the level of difficulty, so a primitive IQ like mine could understand his explanation.
    “Your computer’s too old,” he said. “I could wave a dead chicken over it, but it will never, ever hold a high-speed connection.”
    “So what do I do?”
    “I suggest you send this up north. Silicon Valley.”
    “Silicon Valley?”
    “Yeah. They’re opening a computer museum up there. They can put yours on display, next to the abacus.”
    I elbowed him, right in his bony rib cage.
    Mike Koenigs was only 6 years younger than me, but it might as well have been 60. He was raised on data like I was on chants. When he was a little kid, he used to breathe on the school bus window and then trace algorithms on the foggy glass.
    Mike was skinny as a rail, with a thatch of black curly hair and a Van Dyke beard of which he was overly proud. His workday, like a vampire’s, started at sundown, and he had the chalky complexion to prove it. He pedal-buzzed around on his eROCKIT, an imported electric hybrid motorbike, knees jutting from both sides. He was gangly, awkward, and tongue-tied around most people, but a flat-out genius when it came to computers.
    Mike and I got acquainted the hard way, when I arrested him on a cyber-hacking beef. He’d compromised the database of his own bank, and the Glendale branch of the Bank of America was not happy about it. He said his intent was not malicious, unless you call exacting revenge for bad customer service malicious—some might call it instant karma. In any case, he was so ticked off at their inability to correct a computing error that left his balance several hundred dollars short, and their insistence that it was his own miscalculation, that he hacked into the bank’s system and transferred the exact amount in dispute from the bank manager’s account to his own. The cyber-prank resulted in a major panic for the bank, and an arrest for Mike. I was the one who persuaded the DA not to try him as an adult.
    Mike was 17 at the time, just an overgrown adolescent wiseass, but I could see he was a burgeoning genius. He had the talent. He was still looking for the right stage on which to perform. I kept an eye on him in Juvenile Hall and encouraged him to use the time to get a degree in programming. On the day of