Chapter 1
The man across from Jason was eyeing him with open distaste.
Jason returned the distaste with interest, or rather with calculated disinterest. The leather vest under the suit coat, the too-many and too-large rings and not-quite-concealed chain necklace, and the modded personal car Jason had watched him pull up in were all part of an image Bruno was projecting.
That image was completed by his goon of a bodyguard, looming behind him in a suit that was a touch too small, probably by design to make him look like he was about to burst out of it in an explosion of muscle and testosterone.
Maybe he just wasn’t used to wearing a suit.
Jason had required his clients to wear one, as well as to carry wheatgrass smoothies and to walk confidently to this fourth-floor conference room in this swanky Arlington hotel in eyesight of the NNA Tower, which Jason had reserved by phishing his way into the hotel’s calendar app and adding a generically named “Strategy Session.” No one had stopped them because they were obviously businessmen working a deal.
Which was true, in its way. But Jason could see the hard outline of a gun beneath the goon’s too-tight suit jacket.
Bruno’s much better tailored coat doubtless concealed his own.
The most lethal shape in Bruno’s suit, though, was probably Bruno himself.
The dude looked like a Navy SEAL, if a Navy SEAL had decided, Clark Kent–like, to disguise himself by donning a three-piece suit and a pair of out-of-fashion smartglasses.
Jason was also wearing a suit, though unlike the goon’s, Jason’s was too loose.
Or maybe his body didn’t fill it out. Same diff.
He’d always had a bit of a noncommittal relationship with his body.
He was basically glad it was there, but he didn’t pay it a lot of attention other than making sure it didn’t accumulate any unwanted mass.
Bruno’s body was twice as there, and his extra mass looked like the useful kind.
These things—bling, car, goon, both kinds of guns—were meant to make Jason feel impressed or intimidated or both. So he kept his expression locked in what he hoped looked like boredom and slouched in his chair to hide the fact that he was, in fact, terrified.
Bruno broke the tense silence that had fallen between them. “We negotiated this already, Mr. ‘Ghost.’” Jason could hear the scare quotes. “You said you could do it.”
“And you said you had an in,” Jason replied. “You said you could get me the info I wanted.”
“I did.”
“So gimme that, and I’ll take it from there.”
Bruno leaned forward. His eyes were hidden behind his darkened smartglasses, but his thick lips were compressed. “Boost my confidence,” he said. “Because I’m a little concerned I hired someone who needs my help to do the job I hired him to do.”
“To accomplish my freely chosen freelance business opportunity, you mean?” Jason said.
He was wearing lenses, not glasses, but over them he, too, had placed a pair of glasses, transparent to him but dark to everyone else.
You could learn a lot from someone’s eyes, and phreakers were not in the business of giving away information.
So here they were, wearing sunglasses indoors like try-hards.
Bruno, he had to admit, pulled it off. Jason only hoped he himself looked as cool and aloof as he was trying desperately to feel.
A message slid into his smartspace. I have made the appropriate sacrifices to the RNG gods
He felt a grin try to surface despite everything, and suppressed it. Sprite had the uncanny ability to guess when he needed a little reassurance. He subvocalized a text back: Did you remember to burn the symbolic dice?
The dice are burned. Their ashes were used to inscribe Brother Edvin’s original Latin description of the middle-square method on seven pieces of paper, which were placed in a hat.
I chose one blindly and used it as the seed for a Mersenne Twister, the output of which I converted to ASCII, then scanned for words of three or more letters.
Your fortune is . . . There was a pause. Sip hop cow gumdrop
Profound, Jason replied.
I thought “gumdrop” was promising. The odds of getting a seven-letter word are vanishingly small
Great. You just used up all my luck
So make some more
Jason suppressed another tight grin. Despite the black humor about random number generators—the computer equivalent of a dice roll—Sprite was reminding him that he still had power here.
This might be the biggest gamble of both their lives, but phreakers didn’t rely on chance.
They loaded the dice. They hacked the RNG.
“So you’re just an honest businessman,” Bruno was saying, lip curling.
“At least as much as you are,” Jason replied.
He subvocalized a command, and a commercial trust check program on his phone analyzed Bruno’s MeNetID history.
In less than a second, it consumed the man’s online life, analyzed it, weighed it, and passed judgment.
A number appeared over Bruno’s head: ninety-one. An incredibly trustworthy person.
Most people with a score that good were full-time influencers, narcissists who played the social accountability game masterfully, amassing millions of followers, thousands of in-depth interactions, and a careful history of communication on the Nets calculated to make the algorithms decide they were a net benefit to society.
Bruno’s history was sparse but somehow hit the algorithms such that they judged him one hell of an upstanding dude.
Jason had done his research and amassed a separate dossier on the man, and none of what he’d found explained the score. More the opposite.
Jason was no more honest, of course, but the law of phreaker Darwinism meant that any phreaker who’d been in operation for more than a couple of months was a good phreaker, and by the law of supply and demand, that only made Jason’s services more valuable.
“Think of it as an investment,” he told Bruno.
“The real currency of hacking isn’t money; it’s information.
And like any investment, you have to put in to take out. ”
Bruno held his gaze for a moment, then grunted, leaned back, and nodded to his goon. The goon pulled a slip of paper out of his pocket and handed it to Jason.
“Paper?” Jason said as he took it. “That’s one way to be secure.
” On the paper was written, in pencil, the words Albert Chandler, WasteNet Employee ID 9236511.
WasteNet, huh? Newbie Chandler had climbed the ladder of life and landed a job at the NNA—where he now spent his time monitoring shit.
That must look impressive in his mother’s annual Christmas letter. “You sure he’s the newest hire?”
“You gonna doubt me?” Bruno growled.
“I trust you,” Jason said. For this, at least. He handed the paper back to the goon. “Better eat that, big guy. In case we’re compromised.”
The goon actually started to lift his hand toward his mouth, but Bruno looked at him sharply and the goon let his arm drop, trying to make the motion casual, and tore the paper into little strips instead.
Jason suppressed a grin. Bruno’s lips twitched, whether in shared amusement or annoyance, Jason didn’t know.
Jason leaned back and subvocalized a command to his phone. His smartspace sprang into being, and he arranged the windows comfortably around him. “Want to watch?” He sent a window share to Bruno.
“Oh, I’d love to,” Bruno said, as he accepted the share. “We’ve tes—tried this before. No one’s been able to get through. The NNA is impregnable.”
“OverNet is. The NOC is. But not the rest, not to a real phreaker.”
“They were real”—the man couldn’t bring himself to say it—“hackers. Working for me. Part of my organization.”
Jason was sure they were. No hacker off the street would take a job to directly attack the National Networks Administration. Except, well, him. He said, “They just thought they were phreakers.” He opened a virtual keyboard, spread it across his knees, and began typing.
“Unlike you, the real hacker, who just told me hacking the NOC is impossible.”
“That proves I’m not boasting. No phreaker, not even the best, has been able to so much as ping the NOC.
” From his seat, Jason had direct line of sight out the hotel windows to the NNA Tower, where it rose from the Potomac on what had once been Theodore Roosevelt Island, like a watchtower guarding the forest of greenery-topped “treescrapers” of inner DC.
He was too close to see the dome atop the Tower where the Network Operations Center resided, but he was acutely aware of its presence, the peak of Norman’s empire literally as well as figuratively.
It was where OverNet was administered, and OverNet controlled all other Nets.
It was said that not even the president had clearance to the NOC without Norman’s say-so.
To Jason, that wasn’t just a red flag, it was a whole parade.
But to the people of the United States, it was reassurance.
That level of security was necessary for Norman to save them all from another bot invasion and Cybercrash.
When Jason had first heard about the bot invasion as a kid, he had imagined a war with literal dronebots and laser guns. That might have been better than the truth. Americans didn’t fight robots—they fought each other.