Free Cyberpunk by Bruce Bethke Page B

finally
    fell into a nervous sleep. In my dream Dad was a fire-breathing cyborg
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    dragon, and Mom kept politely asking him not to breath so much fire.
    Georgie was there, blimping up and sprouting roots like an old potato,
    and Lisa was slowly peeling off her tatterblouse. But I never got to see
    what was underneath, ‘cause just then Rayno came crashing through the
    front plate glass of Buddy’s with a whole squad of blackshirt Lucasfilm
    cartoon Nazis ...
    Somehow, though, I could never quite figure out whether he was
    fighting them. Or leading them.
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    ©1982, 1998 Bruce Bethke
    Chapter 0/ 7
    I woke up with an earache and numb hands. The numb hands part I
    understood—soon’s I tried to stretch and yawn, and felt the tight plastic
    cuffs biting into my soft, skinny wrists—but the other thing remained a
    puzzler. Earache? The little inference engine in my head did a quickie
    cold-boot:
    CONDITION: Eardrums hurt
    /because/ cabin pressure is rising
    /because/ plane is losing altitude
    /and/ plane is still in controlled flight
    THEREFORE: We’re landing! I snapped full awake and pressed
    face against window, looking for landmarks. It was a murky pastel false
    dawn down there, and that made it hard to tell.
    Meantime, the earache was getting fierce. I tried to swallow and pop
    my ears, but my mouth was too dry. Maybe I could ask the gestapo for a
    dixie of water? I scanned the two sitting up at the front of the cabin and
    scratched the idea. From the crisp, serious look of their dark green
    uniforms I guessed we weren’t going to Computer Camp.
    So where were we going? I got a dry swallow down and the earache
    backed off some, but I was still having trouble thinking clear. Cold,
    tired, thirsty: the Starfire in my inside pocket digging into my belly like
    a little plastic brick, my headchips seriously garbaged by that whole
    scene outside Buddy’s. Just what the Hell had happened ?
    My hypothesis generator kicked into high gear and started to spin
    out rough scenarios in my mind. Game #1: Rayno Turns Rat. He was
    pissed at me, yeah, that was it. Rayno was seriously pissed at me, and
    wanted to burn me truly bad, all because of old man Hansen’s dumb
    stunt with the Honeywell. But Rayno was scared of me, too, ‘cause he
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    knew how good I was, so he’d gone straight to preemptive nuclear. The
    meeting at Buddy’s was all just a ploy, a smokescreen so I’d be looking
    the other way when he set me up for—
    For who? Nah, didn’t click; cooperating with authority— any
    authority—wasn’t Rayno’s style. Granted, he had motivation, and the
    circumstantials were there. But if Rayno’d wanted to teach me a lesson,
    he would’ve done something with a little more class, right?
    Right?
    The more I processed, the more that unanswered last question made
    my stomach churn. So I scratched the first scenario and popped the next
    one off my stack. Game #2: Paranoia. What if I was even better than I
    thought? What if, pure accidental, my hacking around CityNet had
    stirred up some real heavy attention —say, FBI, CIA, or the Cult of
    Cthulhu or something? And now I was being disappeared to a secret
    Army gulag where they were going to surgically remove my brain? And
    I was going to spend the rest of my life as a mess of loose eyeballs and
    brain tissue floating around in a big glass vat?
    Oh, cool ! I got a great twist in the gut from this one, ‘cause it was so
    neat and total Krueger awful, but then the reality dampers slammed
    down. Come on, Mikey, the government? Get serious. We’re talking
    about people who couldn’t even find the Libyan Hacker Spies, and they
    had an office listed in the Washington D.C. phone directory. No way the
    government cybercops could’ve figured out what I was doing, much less
    caught me doing it. Unless, of course, Georgie’s old man...
    I looked around the plane again, scanned the