"Jerry Davis - The Penalties Of Pirating" - читать интересную книгу автора (Davis Jerry)

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THE PENALTIES OF PIRATING

┬й 1991 by Jerry J. Davis

Previously Published in Aboriginal Science Fiction Magazine



Paco was on the forth floor, sitting beside the open window
with his stolen infra-red shades strapped to his head, when there
was a car wreck up the hill. A big black Ferrari tried to take the
corner too fast and ended up with the corner of a 250 year old
brick building buried halfway up into the hood. Paco muttered,
"Whoa!" and climbed out the window and onto the fire escape,
watching.
As the hapless driver was struggling to open his crumpled
door, a blue IBM business limo came sliding to a stop beside it.
Men with guns piled out and opened fire on the man before he could
make it out of the wreck. He dropped a black case onto the
sidewalk and it popped open, and dozens of silvery disks spilled
out. Most stopped within a few feet, but one came rolling down the
hill like a wheel. Paco held his breath, watching. It rolled right
down to the corner below him and dropped into a storm drain. One
of the men came running down after it, and Paco slipped back into
the window and out of sight.
The man below searched in vain, not finding the silvery disk.
He trudged back up the hill, where his comrades were gathering up
the rest. They took the disks and the black case and drove away,
leaving the Ferrari and the driver behind.
Paco jumped out the window and raced down the fire escape to
the sidewalk, pulled the grate off the storm drain, and peered
down into the murk with his 'red shades set to full enhancement.
The disk gleamed like something made out of light itself. He
grabbed it, shoved it deep into his coat pocket, and was back up
on the forth floor in less than a minute.
Back up inside the apartment, Paco rinsed it off in the sink
and took a good look at it under a light. It was a standard CD, no
markings on it, and no serial number. He slipped it into a slot on
his old VAX Banger and fired it up. Just as he'd thought, it was
some coded computer program, a very large and sophisticated one by
the looks of it. He used a hacker program to determine the
decoding password and wrote it on a little label, and stuck it on
the top side of the disk.
The next day he traded it to Melvin Chevaux for a gig of
stolen slate RAM and a really wicked throwing knife. Three days
later Chevaux sold it to Francisco the Fence for ┬е300 (New
Dollars) and a stolen case of Everclear. Francisco the Fence
passed it off for ┬е550 to Dano Sharks, the software pirate. Dano