The call came part way through the day, the caller a man who wanted a little unfair advantage in a competition between graphic design houses. He sounded like most of my first time customers; a bit unsure of himself, but full of his own audacity in calling somebody like me. I specialize in advantage, knowledge, bits and bytes of information liberated from their fragile shells. I hack, I phreak, I break codes. I am one of the best there is, and my considerable talents don’t come cheap. This gentleman says he understands that, and I have to suppress a laugh—what does someone like him understand about anything? About the risks I take and the things I have to give up, or about the sheer joy of wriggling through firewalls and security procedures, or about the thrill of grabbing your files and getting the hell out before you set off the bells and whistles? But if he’s got the dollars, it doesn’t really matter what he does or does not understand; I can use his needs to fill mine.
He wants to meet me, to hand over files to me in person. I don’t really like that. I understand being paranoid about security—fuck, with people like me out here in the world, you have to be—but face-to-face is pretty archaic, and risky for me. I try to keep as low a profile as possible. I live in a dive out on the Fenway, not out of necessity but out of choice. It’s easy to be invisible when you live among the invisible people, the poor, the marginal. It’s even easier to be invisible when you’ve erased most of the records of your existence from the databases and billing systems that track us all. No driver’s license, no juvie record as long as your arm, no taxes, no utility bills, no credit history— none of those trappings of mundane life for me. There’s very little to prove that I ever existed as anyone except the hacker Electra, with the exception of a few pieces of paper like that birth certificate in a dusty filing cabinet in the glorious township of East Bumfuck, Tennessee, where my drunk mother stopped long enough to give birth to me, christen me after the women in Elvis’ life, and then high tail it out of hicksville for where ever the hell she went next. It isn’t as though I care; I could find her if I wanted, but I don’t see any reason. A motherboard is all the maternal figure I need.
Reluctantly, I agree to meet the client. He suggests a Christies in the Fen, not that far from my apartment. He couldn’t know where I live, he couldn’t. But if he suspects, and I refuse to meet him there… fuck, I don’t like this very much, but I’m in a cash flow crisis. I try to save peeling funds off banks as a last resort, since the banks don’t hesitate to hire people like me to catch people like me, and I know I’m not very nice to the people like me I catch when I’m on a bank job. He wants to meet at 6:30; after business hours, I suppose. I ask how I’ll know who he is; he describes himself, just another dork in a suit, sounds like. Should stick right out in this neighborhood. He asks about me, but I decline to describe myself. You’ll know me when I contact you, I say, and cut the conversation. I still don’t like it very much, but I’m a hardware junkie, and upgrades are always beckoning me with a siren call. I need the money.
It’s five now. I look around the apartment and realize that I’ve been wearing the same clothes for three days now, working on a job, napping on the couch while the nifty little password cracking software I wrote worked on the government mainframe of a small southeast Asian country. Better clean myself up and shower, maybe eat something. Nothing but brown rice in the cupboards, so brown rice it is. I shower and put on my standard bomb tossin’ code crackin’ hacker terrorist threat to the free world outfit, silver t-shirt, black leather jeans, engineer boots, and some very useful pieces of jewelry that I designed myself. Nothing is without a function. My biker jacket is loaded up with the tools of my trade, various sizes of small screwdrivers, little pliers, grounding tether, couple of magnets cause you never know when you might want to fuck up somebody’s credit cards, you know, useful stuff. I look in the mirror—yep, short fluffy lilac hair is still purple and spiky and on top of my head, green eyes are still in the top half of my face, freckles are still on my nose. I bolt a bowl of rice while listening to some old Misfits bootlegs, give my email one last check, toss on my jacket, check the palmtop in the jacket pocket and the knife in my right boot, and I’m out the door.
It’s a ten minute walk, max. I saunter in and scope the place out. Yep, my client sure does stick out, nervous looking man in a gray suit clutching a leather briefcase. He’s pretending to be pricing eggs. How funny. I walk past him; I want to see exactly who else is in this store, because I still don’t trust him. Nobody but the regular junkies, winos, gangsters and cretins that form my little residential community. The coast seems clear. I turn back to make contact with my client—
Glass shatters, and I drop instinctively. I glance at the client, but he looks as confused as me. In fact, he looks about ready to wet himself. Fuckin’ yuppies, can’t handle a little urban reality. I figure it’s a hold up; happens on a pretty regular basis, just bad luck that it’s now. Wait a minute though, who the hell are these people? These are not the regulars, that’s for damn sure. In a regular hold up, seven year old little girls don’t stand guard with a shotgun while fetish queens and street punks and tankgrrls take over the store. This is definitely wrong. The clerk has his hands up, but they aren’t moving towards the register. There’s, I can’t quite see, but I think there’s four of them, including the little girl. The Tank Girl lookalike moves over to my client and swings a bat in her hands— shit, maybe this is about the job after all. She sees me watching her and smiles unpleasantly.
"What are you looking at?"
Sometimes my mouth doesn’t get the warning signals from my brain until it’s too late. Instead of minding my own business and telling her nothing and looking away, something makes me ask if she knows him.
"Know him? Why the hell would I want to know a piece of trash like this?" and crack! goes the bat against his ribs. I see that he has wet himself. It’s a little more understandable now but it’s still pathetic. I think he’s whimpering. I’m about to tell her that I’m just minding my own business and couldn’t care less about what’s going on when another of them walks over to me, a boy punk, looks about fifteen or so. He stops right next to me where I’m crouched on the floor, so I have to look up at him, past the barrels of a sawed off shotgun. It occurs to me that I might be about to die, but there’s something fascinating about these people, I can’t keep from staring at him when I know I should be looking down, avoiding eye contact. They seem, I don’t know, like they’re from another planet, like they know that they’re better than everyone else in the room. The last words I expect to hear come out of his mouth.
"Here, take this and keep the clerk covered while I get the car, we’ve got what we came for," and he holds the butt end of the gun out to me. Is he serious? Is this some kind of a trick, some bizarre gang thing where they can’t kill me unless I’m armed? I can feel their eyes on me, and I can’t hear anything but the pounding of my own blood in my head, and the whimpers of the man in the suit as Tank Girl pokes at him like a cat with a mouse. Take it? Is he asking me to join them? I had sworn off all this kind of juvenile crap once I found my skills with a mouse and modem, but the old lure of the excitement, that outlaw feeling, is still there, the adrenaline is rushing at the thought. Before I know quite what I’m doing, I reach out for the gun and slowly stand up, more than half expecting bullets to rip through my back at any moment. The punk smiles at me, and I hear the others cheering— what the hell is going on here? What do I think I’m doing? I turn to look at the others, and see the clerk out of the corner of my eye, he’s reaching under the counter, he’s got a shotgun of his own. It’s pure reflex on my part— I swing the sawed-off up to my shoulder and fire, but the flash is too loud, the light too bright until abruptly the light stops and I can’t hear anything except my own blood again and I feel my legs crumple under me. During the eternity it takes for the rest of me to hit the floor I try to face the fact that I’m dead, but darkness overtakes me before I’ve quite accepted my demise.
Chapter Two, in which I am Embraced and in turn embrace my unlife...
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