Free Hack by Peter Wrenshall

down some side roads, into the neighborhood indicated on the map. This was the flip side of my new neighborhood. It was rundown, and some houses even looked abandoned. I pedaled slowly down the road until I came to the address I had memorized. It was a shabby, once-white, single-story house.
    I made my way up the modest driveway, and pushed the doorbell. When that didn’t bring any reply, I knocked hard, and saw a shadow move behind the glass. A teenage girl opened the door, just enough to look out, and then stood, staring at me, without saying anything.
    “I’ve come about the computer,” I said.
    The girl gave me a gloomy once-over with her dark eyes, and then opened the door. I leaned my bike on the wall, wondering whether it would be safe in that neighborhood, and then went in. Without waiting to shut the door behind me, the girl walked off down the hallway, and stuck her head in a doorway. I heard her say,
    “eBay.”
    Then she came back toward me, and I got a better look at her. She was dressed strangely, and was wearing heavy black eye makeup. She looked okay, but odd. Her hair looked like she was in the middle of dying it, and hadn’t quite finished. I thought she was going to say something to me, but she turned suddenly, went into a room, and closed the door. I stood waiting in the hall.
    33

    For a minute, everything was quiet. Then a woman in her early forties came out into the hallway, and gave me the same gloomy once-over as the girl. She was dressed in what looked like overalls—the sort of thing I had seen the women from the paint factory in my old neighborhood wearing.
    “Hi,” I said.
    “He’ll be here in a minute,” said the woman bluntly, without smiling. I nodded, and the woman turned and went back into the room. For a minute, I stood there in the silence, looking around. Everything was old, but clean. The place looked like it had last been decorated at least two presidents ago, but steam-cleaned an hour ago. There wasn’t anything out of place—not a shoe or a paper clip.
    I looked at the ornaments hanging on the wall. They had moons, stars, and astronomical patterns. I wondered again about my bike. I was just about to look out through the window in the door when a man walked into the hallway. He was tall, and had a long graying ponytail. He was dressed like a lot of truck drivers I had seen, and he was carrying a computer case.
    “Hi,” I said.
    “You’ve come for the notebook?” he asked. His voice sounded like gravel being trod on. I answered yes. He looked me over, and apparently came to the same conclusion as the girl and the woman, whatever that was. He handed me the case, still closed.
    “Do you mind if I take a look?” I asked.
    He seemed to mind, but I went ahead anyway. There wasn’t any place else I was free from prying eyes to switch the thing on, and no computer geek can resist a peek at a new gadget. I unzipped the bag, and slid the machine out. It was barely touched, not the sort that a guy from that neighborhood would have, but the sort that the boss on the top floor gets, just because the bigwigs always seem to want the best gadgets, and always seem to get them.
    It was so hot that it nearly burned my fingers. The ad had said ‘like new,’ but looking at it, I guessed that it really was new, and seemed to be completely unused. A bit of the thin transparent plastic cover clung to the edge of the keyboard.
    I can’t see the marks where it fell off the back of the truck, I thought, but didn’t say.
    “I like NeoTeks,” I said out loud, just to be saying something. I hit the power button, and the machine booted surprisingly quickly into Windows. There was no logon screen. I pushed the pointer around the screen to see what was installed.
    Nothing. This was an untouched factory build, with no applications—not even freeware. No wonder it was so fast to boot up.
    It always shocks me to think back to the equipment I used to hack on. When the feds busted me, they spent