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"0wnz0red" | 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8


"How long have you been on the road, then?" Murray asked. His mouth tasted like an ashtray and he had a mild case of the shakes.

"Four months. I've been breaking into cars mostly. Stealing laptops and selling them for cash. I've got a box at the rooming-house with the hard-drive installed, and I've been using an e-gold account to buy little things online to help me out."

"Help you out with what?"

"Hacking -- duh. First thing I did was reverse-engineer the interface bug. I wanted a safe virus I could grow arbitrary payloads for in my body. I embedded the antiviral hardening agent in the vector. It's a sexually transmissible wellness, dude. I've been barebacking my way through the skankiest crack-hoes in the Tenderloin, playing Patient Zero, infecting everyone with the Cure."


Murray sat up and his head swam. "You did what?"

"I cured AIDS. It's going around, it's catching, you might already be a winner."

"Jesus, Liam, what the fuck do you know about medicine? For all you know, your cure is worse than the disease -- for all you know, we're all going to have a -- 'liquidity event' any day now!"

"No chance of that happening, bro. I isolated the cause of that early on. This medical stuff is just not that complicated -- once you get over the new jargon, it's nothing you can't learn as you go with a little judicious googling. Trust me. You're soaking in it."

It took Murray a moment to parse that. "You infected me?"

"The works -- I've viralized all the best stuff. Metabolic controllers, until further notice, you're on a five-cheeseburger-a-day diet; increased dendrite density; muscle-builders. At-will pain-dampeners. You'll need those -- I gave you the interface, too."

A spasm shot up Murray's back, then down again.

"It was on the cigarette butt. You're cancer-immune, by the by. I'm extra contagious tonight." Liam turned down his collar to show Murray the taped lump there, the dangling cable that disappeared down his shirt, connecting to the palmtop strapped to his belt.

Murray arched his back and mewled through locked jaws.

Liam caught his head before it slammed into the Toyota's hood. "Breathe," he hissed. "Relax. You're only feeling the pain because you're choosing not to ignore it. Try to ignore it, you'll see. It kicks azz."

- - - - - - - - - - - -

"I needed an accomplice. A partner in crime. I'm underground, see? No credit-card, no ID. I can't rent a car or hop a plane. I needed to recruit someone I could trust. Naturally, I thought of you."

"I'm flattered," Murray sarcased around a mouthful of double-bacon cheeseburger with extra mayo.

"You should be, asshole," Liam said. They were at Murray's one-bedroom techno-monastic condo: shit sofa, hyper-ergonomic chairs, dusty home theatre, computers everywhere. Liam drove them there, singing into the wind that whipped down from the sunroof, following the GPS's sterile eurobabe voice as it guided them back to the anonymous shitbox building where Murray had located his carcass for eight years.

"Liam, you're a pal, really, my best friend ever, I couldn't be happier that you're alive, but if I could get up I would fucking kill you. You raped me, asshole. Used my body without my permission."

"You see it that way now, but give it a couple weeks, it'll, ah, grow on you. Trust me. It's rad. So, call in sick for the next week -- you're going to need some time to get used to the mods."

"And if I don't?"

"Do whatever you want, buddy, but I don't think you're going to be in any shape to go to work this week -- maybe not next week either. Tell them it's a personal crisis. Take some vacation days. Tell 'em you're going to a fat-farm. You must have a shitload of holidays saved up."

"I do," Murray said. "I don't know why I should use them, though."

"Oh, this is the best vacation of all, the Journey Thru Innerspace. You're going to love it."

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Murray hadn't counted on the coding.

Liam tunneled into his box at the rooming house and dumped its drive to one of the old laptops lying around Murray's apartment. He set the laptop next to Murray while he drove to Fry's Electronics to get the cabling and components he needed to make the emitter/receiver for the interface. They'd always had a running joke that you can build anything from parts at Fry's, but when Liam invoked it, Murray barely cracked a smile. He was stepping through the code in a debugger, reading the comments Liam had left behind as he'd deciphered its form and function.

He was back in it. There was a runtime that simulated the platform and as he tweaked the code, he ran it on the simulator and checked out how his body would react if he executed it for real. Once he got a couple of liquidity events, he saw that Liam was right, they just weren't that hard to avoid.

The API was great, there were function calls for just about everything. He delved into the cognitive stuff right off, since it was the area that was rawest, that Liam had devoted the least effort to. At-will serotonin production. Mnemonic perfection. Endorphin production, adrenalin. Zen master on a disk. Who needs meditation and biofeedback when you can do it all in code?

Out of habit, he was documenting as he went along, writing proper tutorials for the API, putting together a table of the different kinds of interaction he got with different mods. Good, clear docs, ready for printing, able to be slotted in as online help in the developer toolkit. Inspired by Joey, he began work on a routine that would replace all the maintenance chores that the platform did in sleep-mode, along with a subroutine that suppressed melatonin and all the other circadian chemicals that induced sleep.

Liam returned from Fry's with bags full of cabling and soldering guns and breadboards. He draped a black pillowcase over a patch of living-room floor and laid everything out on it, wires and strippers and crimpers and components and a soldering gun, and went to work methodically, stripping and crimping and twisting. He'd taken out his own connector for reference and he was comparing them both, using a white LED torch on a headband to show him the pinouts on the custom end.

"So I'm thinking that I'll clone the controller and stick it on my head first to make sure it works. You wear my wire and I'll burn the new one in for a couple days and then we can swap. OK?"

"Sure," Murray said, "whatever." His fingers rattled on the keys.

"Got you one of these," Liam said and held up a bulky Korean palmtop. "Runs Linux. You can cross-compile the SDK and all the libraries for it; the compiler's on the drive. Good if you want to run an interactive app --" an application that changed its instructions based on output from the platform -- "and it's stinking cool, too. I fucking love gear."

"Gear's good," Murray agreed. "Cheap as hell and faster every time I turn around."

"Well, until Honorable Computing comes along," Liam said. "That'll put a nail in the old coffin."

"You're overreacting."

"Naw. Just being realistic. Open up a shell, OK? See at the top, how it says 'tty'? The kernel thinks it's communicating with a printer. Your shell window is a simulation of a printer, so the kernel knows how to talk to it -- it's got plenty of compatibility layers between it and you. If the guy who wrote the code doesn't want you to interface with it, you can't. No emulation, that's not 'honorable.' Your box is 0wned."

Murray looked up from his keyboard. "So what do you want me to do about it, dead man?"

"Mostly dead," Liam said. "Just think about it, OK? How much money you got in your savings account?"

"Nice segue. Not enough."

"Not enough for what?"

"Not enough for sharing any of it with you."

"Come on, dude, I'm going back underground. I need fifty grand to get out of the country -- Canada, then buy a fake passport and head to London. Once I'm in the EU, I'm in good shape. I learned German last week, this week I'm doing French. The dendrite density shit is the shit."

"Man und zooperman," Murray said. "If you're zo zooper, go and earn a buck or two, OK?"

"Come on, you know I'm good for it. Once this stuff is ready to go --"

"What stuff?"

"The codebase! Haven't you figured it out yet? It's a startup! We go into business in some former-Soviet Stan in Asia or some African kleptocracy. We infect the locals with the Cure, then the interface, and then we sell 'em the software. It's viral marketing, gettit?"

"Leaving aside CIA assassins, if only for the moment, there's one gigantic flaw in your plan, dead-man."

"I'm all aflutter with anticipation."

"There's no fucking revenue opportunity. The platform spreads for free -- it's already out there, you've seeded it with your magic undead super-cock. The hardware is commodity hardware, no margin and no money. The controller can be built out of spare parts from Fry's -- next gen, we'll make it WiFi, so that we're using commodity wireless chipsets and you can control the device from a distance --"

"-- yeah, and that's why we're selling the software!" Liam hopped from foot to foot in a personal folk-dance celebrating his sublime cleverness.

"In Buttfuckistan or Kleptomalia. Where being a warez d00d is an honorable trade. We release our libraries and binaries and APIs and fifteen minutes later, they're burning CDs in every souk and selling them for ten cents a throw."

"Nope, that's not gonna happen."

"Why not?"

"We're gonna deploy on Honorable hardware."

"I am not hearing this." Murray closed the lid of his laptop and tore into a slice of double-cheese meat-lover's deep-dish pizza. "You are not telling me this."

"You are. I am. It's only temporary. The interface isn't Honorable, so anyone who reverse-engineers it can make his own apps. We're just getting ours while the getting is good. All the good stuff -- say, pain-control and universal antiviral hardening -- we'll make for free, viralize it. Once our stuff is in the market, the whole world's going to change, anyway. There'll be apps for happiness, cures for every disease, hibernation, limb-regeneration, whatever. Anything any human body has ever done, ever, you'll be able to do at-will. You think there's going to be anything recognizable as an economy once we're ubiquitous?"

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The Free Software Project
Read Andrew Leonard's book-in-progress on Linux and open source -- and post your comments.

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