"Noel K Hannan - Divide By Zero" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hannan Noel K)

Divide by Zero
a short story by Noel K Hannan
art by Frazer Irving

I remember the night they finally caught up with me.
Christ, do I remember the night they finally caught up with me.
Dickens had sent the instructions down the wire. The fone beeped twice
while Bobby was hogging my portable deck in the living room, playing Death
Holocaust 2099 or some other illegal hyper-addictive shit, rubber eyecups
masking-taped to his face, and I had to turf him off to get at my mail. He
skulked away to the big monitor in our bedroom but mum had pinched it for
the teevee session I had installed. She'd blown her set when she missed
out on a big e-lottery win by one number - 24 instead of cosmic 23 - and
she'd put her big fat furry-slippered foot through the screen. Bobby was
pissed off but he knew better than to try and keep mum and teevees apart
for more than a matter of minutes. Me, I would have rather have tried my
chances cold-turkeying the Jizz addicts down at the mall.
Dickens liked to play his little secret agent games and give two beeps on
the fone so we knew when to pick up instructions from our anonymous
mailboxes. We were supposed to retrieve them, read them and delete the
files within ten minutes or something, and never ever hardcopy. Thing was,
much of the stuff was far too complicated to memorise - mail aliases,
corporate web site addresses, credit card numbers, passwords, sign ons. A
single character wrong in the middle of any of that shit and you might as
well not even have started, especially as the security procedures that any
suspicious infringement called into play would have the Boys in Black
knocking on your door within minutes. So I ignored Dickens' warnings about
copies and evidence and auditable trails and dumped each night's
instructions into a spare chunk of volatile RAM that erased itself when I
switched the deck off. That way, I got to use accurate data in my work,
cutting and pasting to minimise keystroke errors, and if the heat came
down while I was on the job - well, illegal password ownership would have
been the least of my worries. My deck, mum's teevee, the big monitor,
Bobby's VR eyecups - everything in our house that was made out of black
plastic or had an electrical plug was hotter than the centre of the sun.
Bobby took the hint and muttering something about not being wanted,
bundled himself up in a thick quilted jacket with luminous kanji appliquщd
on the back, and disappeared out into the gathering October gloom. I
watched him cross the shattered concrete lot that fronted our housing
unit, sidestepping deep puddles of greasy water, and vanish into the
hinterland of twisted metal bracing and blackened shells of buildings,
swallowed up by this shit pile we called our home. It was, like they say,
a jungle out there, but me and my brother were trainee predators, feral
beasts born and raised. We were survivors, if nothing else. Mum didn't
even lift her head as Bobby left.
With Bobby out of the way and mum safely entrenched in front of the
teevee, I jacked my deck into the socket I had rigged from the municipal
LAN line that ran in a drain housing a few hundred metres from our house.
I read somewhere once that there were more illegal nodes on most
security-free municipal LANs than authorised ones. It was just too easy to