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"0wnz0red" | 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 "Ring Minus One," Liam said, and skipped a rock over the oily-black surface of the water, getting four long bounces out of it. "Yeah." Murray said. Ring Zero, the first registers in the processor, was where your computer checked to figure out how to start itself up. Compromise Ring Zero and you can make the computer do anything -- load an alternate operating system, turn the whole box into a brain-in-a-jar, executing in an unknown environment. Ring Minus One, well, that was like God-code, space on another, virtual processor that was unalterable, owned by some remote party, by LoCal and its entertainment giants. Software was released without any copy-prevention tech because everyone knew that copy-prevention tech didn't work. Nevertheless, Hollywood was always chewing the scenery and hollering, they just didn't believe that the hairfaces and ponytails didn't have some seekrit tech that would keep their movies safe from copying until the heat death of the universe or the expiry of copyright, whichever came last. "You run this stuff," Liam said, carefully, thinking it through, like he'd done before he got sick, murdered by his need to feed speedballs to his golden, tracked-out arm. "You run it and while you're watching a movie, Hollywood 0wnz your box." Murray heard the zero and the zee in 0wnz. Hacker-speak for having total control. No one wants to be 0wnz0red by some teenaged script-kiddie who's found some fresh exploit and turned it loose on your computer. "In a nutsac. Gimme a butt." Liam shook one out of the pack and passed it to Murray, along with a box of Mexican strike-anywhere matches. "You're back on these things?" Liam said, a note of surprise in his voice. "Not really. Special occasion, you being back from the dead and all. I've always heard that these things'd kill me, but apparently being killed isn't so bad -- you look great." "Artful segue, dude. You must be burning up with curiosity." "Not really," Murray said. "Figgered I'm hallucinating. I haven't hallucinated up until now, but back when I was really down, you know, clinical, I had all kinds of voices muttering in my head, telling me that I'd fucked up, it was all fucked up, crash the car into the median and do the world a favor, whatever. You get a little better from that stuff by changing jobs, but maybe not all the way better. Maybe I'm going to fill my pockets with rocks and jump in the lake. It's the next logical step, right?" Liam studied his face. Murray tried to stay deadpan, but he felt the old sadness that came with the admission, the admission of guilt and weakness, felt the tears pricking his eyes. "Hear me out first, OK?" Liam said. "By all means. It'd be rude not to hear you out after you came all the way here from the kingdom of the dead." "Mostly dead. Mostly. Ever think about how all the really good shit in your body -- metabolism, immunoresponse, cognition -- it's all in Ring Minus One? Not user-accessible? I mean, why is it that something like wiggling your toes is under your volitional control, but your memory isn't?" "Well, that's complicated stuff -- heartbeat, breathing, immunoresponse, memory. You don't want to forget to breathe, right?" Liam hissed a laugh. "Horse-sheeit," he drawled. "How complicated is moving your arm? How many muscle-movements in a smile? How many muscle-movements in a heartbeat? How complicated is writing code versus immunoresponse? Why when you're holding your breath can't you hold it until you don't want to hold it anymore? Why do you have to be a fucking Jedi Master to stop your heart at will?" "But the interactions --" "More horseshit. Yeah, the interactions between brain chemistry and body and cognition and metabolism are all complicated. I was a speed-freak, I know all about it. But it's not any more complicated than any of the other complex interactions you master every day -- wind and attack and spin when someone tosses you a ball; speed and acceleration and vectors when you change lanes; don't even get me started on what goes on when you season a soup. No, your body just isn't that complicated -- it's just hubris that makes us so certain that our meat-sacks are transcendently complex. "We're simple, but all the good stuff is 0wned by your autonomic systems. They're like conditional operators left behind by a sloppy coder: while x is true, do y. We've only had the vaguest idea what x is, but we've got a handle on y, you betcha. Burning fat, for example." He prodded Murray's gut-overhang with a long finger. Self-consciously, Murray tugged his JavaOne gimme jacket tighter. "For forty years now, doctors have been telling us that the way to keep fit is to exercise more and eat less. That's great fucking advice, as can be demonstrated by the number of trim, fit residents of Northern California that can be found waddling around any shopping mall off Interstate 101. Look at exercise, Jesus, what could be stupider? Exercise doesn't burn fat, exercise just satisfies the condition in which your body is prepared to burn fat off. It's like a computer that won't boot unless you restart it twice, switch off the monitor, open the CD drive and stand on one foot. If you're a luser, you do all this shit every time you want to boot your box, but if you're a leet hax0r like you and me, you just figure out what's wrong with the computer and fix it. You don't sacrifice a chicken twice a day, you 0wn the box, so you make it dance to your tune. "But your meat, it's not under your control. You know you have to exercise for 20 minutes before you start burning any fat at all? In other words, the first twenty minutes are just a goddamned waste of time. It's sacrificing a chicken to your metabolism. Eat less, exercise more is a giant chicken-sacrifice, so I say screw it. I say, you should be super-user in your own body. You should be leet as you want to be. Every cell in your body should be end-user modifiable." Liam held his hands out before them, then stretched and stretched and stretched the fingers, so that each one bent over double. "Triple jointed, metabolically secure, cognitively large and in charge. I 0wn, dude." Liam fished the last cig out of the pack, crumpled it and tucked it into a pocket. "Last one," he said. "Wanna share?" "Sure," Murray said, dazedly. "Yeah," he said, taking the smoke and bringing it to his lips. The tip, he realized too late, was dripping with saliva. He made a face and handed it back to Liam. "Aaagh! You juiced the filter!" "Sorry," Liam said, "talking gets my spit going. Where was I? Oh, yeah, I 0wn. Want to know how it happened?" "Does it also explain how you ended up not dead?" "Mostly dead. Indeed it does." Murray walked back to the car and lay back on the hood, staring at the thin star-cover and the softly swaying pine-tops. He heard Liam begin to pace, heard the cadence of Liam's thinking stride, the walk he fell into when he was on a roll. "Are you sitting comfortably?" Liam said. "Then I shall begin."
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