XGeneration 1: You Don't Know Me Read Online Free PDF Page A

message board is total crapola. What does that leave us?” Wayne began humming the Jeopardy theme song. “Oh, wait, wait, I know! You felt it.”
    Scott pressed his lips together and said nothing.
    “Oh, just spit it out, half-wit.”
    Scott sighed. “We’ve been over this. I enter the network. I listen. I feel. That’s all I can tell you. I don’t know how it happens, I don’t know why it works. It just does. If you can’t accept it, that’s your problem.”
    Another long, buzzing silence.
    “Share everything.”
    “What?”
    “That was the promise, the Hacker’s Pact. Share everything. ” Wayne’s voice trembled over the line. “I-I’m the one who got you into phreaking. I’m the one who turned you onto ARPANet. And you keep pulling this… this crap! I’m going to ask you one more time. How did you get in?”
    “I just told you.”
    “Ass-wad.”
    The line clicked. Scott set the phone aside to help J.R. squirm out of his stupid dog sweater. Freed from his knitted bondage, J.R. leaped into a pile of clothes and proceeded to dig out a bed.
    Scott pushed himself from his desk. When his knees cracked, he realized it was the first time he’d stood since the night before, some twenty hours earlier. He staggered through a scatter of empty RC Cola cans, edged past his clothes-draped dresser, between teetering boxes of comic books (the one thing for which he actually had a semi-coherent system of organization) and found his bed. He stretched to his full length, his heels reaching beyond the end of a mattress he had outgrown, featuring a faded Buck Rogers fitted sheet with Twiki the robot. Overhead, model spaceships swung on threads from the AC vent.
    With a gangly leg, Scott pushed aside a couple of Bell South technical manuals, and with the other, a copy of 1984 , which he had yet to even crack. Crap. School tomorrow . Which meant the summer’s hacking marathons were over.
    He dropped his glasses on his chest and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his palms, making stars explode across his vision. He tried telling himself he’d still have nights and weekends, but the notion only depressed him. The thought of sitting through seven classes, computerless, modemless, in a new school, surrounded by a new class of cretins bent on making his life hell…
    But Janis will be there.
    Her sunlit face from that morning glimmered in his mind’s eye. Scott laced his fingers behind his stiff hair, reveling and suffering in the image. It seemed impossible that a younger version of the same girl used to speak to him, smirk at his jokes, sock him in the shoulder, hold his hand.
    Forgetting his hack and his fight with Wayne, Scott drew his softest pillow around and nuzzled against it. Still holding the image of Janis’s face, he tried to imagine the feel of his fingers running through her hair, holding her cheek. He closed his eyes. Slowly, he began pressing his lips to the pillow.
    A hard rap sounded on the door. “Dinner!”
    Scott thrashed to a sitting position, terrified his mother had opened the door—relieved to find she had not this time. He waited for her sharp footfalls to retreat down the carpeted hallway before kicking out of his pajama bottoms and pulling on a pair of shorts and a mismatched collared shirt. He went to his computer and stared down on it. Once more, his finger hovered over the RETURN key.
    This time, he punched it.
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    ** WELCOME **
    Sunday, 24-AUG-84 5:13pm-PDT
    >
     
    The fatigue left Scott’s body at once. He started to laugh. He had done it. Barely fourteen years old, and he was privy to the stuff of Matthew Broderick movies and hacker dreams.
    He typed in “HELP” to be sure, watching as all of the possible commands marched down his screen in two columns. And because he was an administrator (so far as the system knew) an extra column scrolled out, listing his root privileges. Scott thumped his sternum with his fist, cringing a little at the force of the blow. But there it was: