Free Evil Genius by Catherine Jinks

some fellow hackers. They sent in sniffing programs to intercept his access code. They bombarded him with the contents of password dictionaries. They pestered him like mosquitoes until he became enraged.
    From then on, his user name disappeared from newsgroups and bulletin boards frequented by the world's hackers. He simply didn't trust them enough to make friends, though he did keep an eye on the latest breakthroughs.
    As for his face-to-face contacts, they were just as unsuccessful. He was only thirteen when he entered twelfth grade, around the beginning of first term. All the other kids in this grade were four or five years older than he was, and they thought him a joke. A freak. Their interests revolved around cars, clothes, sex, and (sometimes) exams, so Cadel didn't fit in at all. He wasn't old enough to drive. He was too small to wear most of the trendy clothes. And he'd never had sex, of course, though he was starting to think about it a good deal, simply because of Partner Post. There was a lot of sex talk on his secure sites—more than he'd ever anticipated—and he was reluctant to ask Thaddeus for help on
this
subject. Fortunately, the Piggotts kept a large stock of dirty magazines in their dressing room. And a few of the twelfth-grade boys talked about sex endlessly, obsessively.
    So Cadel was able to piece together some convincing replies to his clients, many of whom, he thought indignantly, were quite disgusting. They didn't deserve to have real partners, in his opinion. They didn't deserve to have partners at
all.
    Cadel spent eight months in twelfth grade, and over this time the Partner Post client base grew from eight to sixty-eight. Only two of these clients were ever introduced to other clients; most of them were provided with fake partners, designed to meet their every need. Cadel even bought an old Photoshop program and pasted together fake "happy snaps" of his fictional clients. He enjoyed doing this. He also enjoyed the challenge of sparking someone's interest, and eventually managed to calculate a primitive kind of formula that allowed him to slot each applicant into one of ten different categories.
    Thaddeus and Cadel had spent entire appointments thrashing out an assessment form that would define the personality of each client. "Sometimes," Thaddeus pointed out, "what they say they want in a partner isn't really what they need in a partner. You have to watch that. You have to watch for the red flags. The use of language—that's very important. There's always a subtext, Cadel,
always.
Never take
anyone
at face value. Everyone always has adjustments to make in this world."
    "And what if they're lying?" Cadel queried. "What if they say they have a university degree, for example, and they really don't? How do I work out what they need if I don't know the truth about them? I can run online checks, but there might be gaps."
    Thaddeus looked down his long nose at Cadel.
    "You might as well ask the same thing about everyone you meet," he observed. "What have you been doing this last year? You've been researching Crampton. And how have you been doing it? By insinuating yourself into people's conversations. By watching and listening and judging. Isn't that so?"
    "I guess..."
    "Well, then." Thaddeus adjusted his spectacles. "Just continue to do what you've been doing, Cadel. Most people aren't good liars—not like you. They don't have the memory for it. They aren't comfortable with it. They overreach themselves. Don't worry," he added, turning back to the first draft of his personality-test questions. "They're bound to slip up before too long. And you're bound to notice when they do."
    Cadel rubbed his nose. He said, in a small voice, "You think I'm a good liar?"
    Thaddeus glanced at him. "Don't you?"
    "I suppose so." Cadel had never really thought of it as
lying.
He had thought of it in terms of stalling, outwitting, omitting. He liked to regard himself as a heroic loner, battling mighty forces, not as a