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  “You don't want to know,” Tech said.

  “New software we got from the Warehouse,” Marz said sheepishly.

  Felix held his hands to his ears. “I don't want to know.”

  “Told ya,” Tech said.

  “Felix,” Marz said with sudden enthusiasm. “Something bizarre happened on the run. First, this program gremlin landed on the Baron's wing.”

  “Even Marz didn't see it coming,” Tech added.

  “Then this shadowy thing called Scaum appeared out of nowhere—”

  “Not out of nowhere,” Felix interrupted. “You were breaking into the EPA. What did you expect security to do, announce itself with balloons and fireworks?”

  “Nuh-uh,” Tech said. “The EPA uses standard-issue security hounds. Now, all of a sudden, it's deploying security shadows? Besides which, Scaum wasn't like any security sentinel I've ever been up against. In fact, I'm not even sure it was a program.”

  “Behaved more like a neural net,” Marz said, nodding.

  “But the weird thing is that the gremlin saved me from Scaum. And that isn't even the half of it. I was—”

  “Enough!” Felix said, holding up his hands. “But, Felix, the gremlin said I freed it. What if it was kidnapped?”

  Felix stared at Tech in theatrical disbelief. “You're listening to some reject game-world gremlin now?”

  “I'm not saying I believe it,” Tech said. “It was all happening so fast…” He turned to Marz. “Play him the download, bro.”

  Marz took his lower lip between his teeth and shook his head. “We lost it when the system crashed.”

  Tech blew out his breath in exasperation, then swung back to Felix. “The gremlin even thanked me.”

  “Good,” Felix said. “Then case closed.”

  “But—”

  Felix held up his hands again. “Listen to me— both of you. I've warned you about wasting what little I pay you on street software. Those programs never work as promised. And I'm a data dick not a police detective, which means I don't do kidnappings.”

  Tech pointed to the glass panel in the office door. “The sign says ‘missing persons.’ “

  “Persons,” Felix stressed, “not gremlins. Can't you stay in the real world for a change?”

  Tech averted Felix's gaze. “The gremlin and the shadow were real, Felix.”

  “Just like the rest of your Network legends, Jess. And no more skipping school, understand?”

  Felix watched the boys hang their heads. He was hardly a good role model for them, but the least he could do was try to sound like an adult.

  “Now, get going.”

  Glumly, Tech spun on his heel and headed for the door with Marz only a step behind.

  Chapter 5

  The Safehaven group home for “transitional teens” occupied the lower three floors of an old hotel. Tech sat on his unmade bed in the cramped room he shared with his brother, notebook computer opened in his lap, trying to wrap his attention around the homework he had failed to turn in along with the extra assignments his teachers had given him as punishment for missing class. For the past ten minutes, he had been staring blankly at the one sentence he had managed to write for an essay that was required to be no less than ten pages long and due no later than the following morning.

  He couldn't get his mind off what had happened during the run into the EPA, which, in recollection, seemed more like a half-recalled bad dream. Felix was probably right—it was ridiculous to put any stock in the mad mutterings of a program gremlin—but Tech couldn't dismiss it so easily.

  Where had the blue gremlin come from? From the ghost program, Subterfuge, as Marshall suspected or from somewhere in the EPA? And what sort of EPA data had it gorged itself on?

  Then there was Scaum, the shapeless shadow that had gone after the gremlin—and Tech in the process. The dismal thing hadn't responded like a security program, so what was it, and what did it want with the gremlin? And finally there was the way the gremlin had piloted the Baron almost clear across the grid, executing precision maneuvers Tech rarely witnessed outside of computer-generated simulations.

  It was like the Network rules had changed over-night.

  He wanted to know what the gremlin had meant by saying that Tech had freed it, and he wanted to know where it had gone after it had abandoned the Baron's upper wing and fled toward the Wilds. But with the corruption of the backup file, it was all a wash. Just another Network mystery—or “legend,” as Felix put it.

  Network legends abounded. There was, for instance, the one about the hacker who, little by little, had been taken over by the programs he wrote; all make and manner of gremlins and ghosts, gifted with extraordinary powers, and escaped from games or born in the fathomless canyons of the Virtual Network itself; and Area X, a site buried deep in the Wilds where rumored First Contact had been made with aliens…

  Tech loosed a despondent sigh.

  He'd lost a race to Bios7, Felix was angry at him, and Fidelia Temper was threatening to suspend his weekend privileges if he cut school again.

  Life didn't always suck, but it sucked just now.

  He set the notebook aside and gazed around the room at the mishmash of computer hardware, sports gear, old books, music synthesizers, and assorted pieces of thrift-store clothing that reflected his and Marz's few interests, as well as their general disregard for order. Untidiness was not uncommon in the group home, but the seeming deliberateness behind the mess in the Vega brothers’ room singled it out from those of their home mates and had made them the bane of counselor Fidelia Temper's existence.

  They had resided in the home for four years now, after a six-year stay with a great-aunt in upstate New York. Their aunt had taken them in after their parents had died in the crash of their private plane somewhere in the South Pacific. The aunt, too, had been a world traveler, and the fact that she spent more time in faraway places than she did at home was what had led to Tech and Marz's eventual enrollment in Safehaven, where it was believed that they could be better supervised. Everyone involved in their relocation had been convinced that the brothers’ repeated school absences and minor troublemaking were due to the fact that they'd grown up with too much freedom. But, in fact—and much to the continuing dismay of Safehaven's director and councilors—Tech and Marz's penchant for skirting the rules had only increased since the move to New York City.

  It wasn't that they hated school or were inca pable of learning. They simply had a difficult time adjusting to the drudgery of homework and the narrow-mindedness of certain schoolmates who refused to accept that Tech and Marz were, well, different.

  For as long as he could remember, Tech had always had trouble staying seated at a desk, raising his hand before answering questions, or caring much about spelling and basic math skills—since even the simplest computers had spellcheck and calculator functions, and Tech couldn't ever picture himself being without a computer. But he wasn't a cybergeek. He thought of computers as vehicles, no different from snowboards, ‘blades, or mountain bikes when you got right down to it. Computers provided him with a means of reaching the edge and riding that edge for all it was worth.

  For Tech, cyberflying was an extreme sport—the extremest of sports.

  Marz, by contrast, had been a worry to any number of teachers and guidance councilors precisely because of too much sitting—in front of screens of one sort or another, music synthesizers, or with books far more advanced than those being read by his age group. He took little interest in sports or social activities, but when it came to designing and customizing cybercraft, there were few that could touch him.

  Short and dark-complexioned, with a headful of brown curls and eyes like mood rings, Marz was contemplative and self-possessed, while loose-limbed, blond-haired Tech was dismissive and quick to anger.

  When they were young, the fact that their aunt had elected to dress them in items she brought back from remote areas of the world rather than in the latest mall fashions further distanced the brothers from the
ir classmates and had often made them objects of ridicule or worse. Tech had been able to handle whatever anyone dished out, but the razzing had been hard on Marz, and Marz's sensitivity had turned Tech into a fighter.

  Tech never looked for fights. But anyone who messed with Marz could count on quick retaliation from his older brother.

  So they had made the most of their aunt's travels and the gullibility of the caretakers in whose charge she left them to avoid school as often as possible, bonding as only brothers could even in pursuit of their separate obsessions. Relocated to New York City and placed suddenly under the supervision of strict disciplinarians like Fidelia Temper, they had been forced to find more creative ways to skip school. But, as before, they could invariably be found exploring the infinite realms of the Virtual Network, the one interest they shared.

  Tech and Marz weren't the first kids of their generation to realize that the world they had been born into had been mapped to the square inch from space and largely drained of real-life adventure. Tropical forests of the sort Tarzan had swung through and that had once concealed the cities of vanished civilizations had all but disappeared, and with them had gone countless species of spectacular animals. Advances in satellite telecommunication had made it possible to make and receive phone calls from anywhere on the globe. Similarly, locators—worn on wrist or belt or implanted beneath the skin—had made it all but inconceivable that one would ever become lost, kidnapped, taken hostage, or grabbed by an angry parent and spirited off to Pakistan or Patagonia.

  Privacy had been surrendered for safety.

  Daredevils and reality-show contestants had replaced explorers.

  And more troubling to Tech, movies, TV, music, and computer games had been made tame, except for the stuff being turned out by rebellious artists headquartered in the Wilds of the Network. Attempts were even being made to housebreak the final frontier—cyberspace—by monitoring the movements of frequent flyers and installing filters and security booths at nearly every entry port and grid intersection.

  The only upside of all this was that the world had become dependent on technology, and the more you knew about computers, digicams, and bar codes, the easier it was to circumvent all the rules and regulations. In the Network, Tech and Marz had discovered all the adventure they had sought in vain in the real world—domains almost beyond their dreams, sites catering to every thinkable fantasy, and a vast underground community of hackers and cyberjockeys, entry into which didn't depend on age, gender, how fashionably you dressed, or how skilled you were at playing ball.

  Two years earlier they had responded to an on-Network help-wanted ad directed at cyberjocks with a talent for finding missing data. The ad had been placed by Felix McTurk, an adept and one-time successful data detective who had found himself falling behind the technological curve, mainly because of his fear of cyberflying. Felix had given the brothers a series of tests, which they had aced, and—sight unseen—had ultimately offered them jobs. When he realized that he had hired two teenagers, however, Felix had withdrawn the offer. But he had been so impressed by Tech and Marz's skills, he had started giving them occasional assignments. Before too long they were spending more time at Data Discoveries than they were at school or at the group home.

  Felix was well meaning but he just didn't understand life on the edge. He saw Marz as a budding cyberarchitect, and Tech as an executive data manager. But Tech wanted more from his future than the promise of steady money. He craved excitement. Felix was in danger of becoming one of those people who settled into a groove as they aged, and Tech was determined to help him avoid that fate—without sabotaging Data Discoveries in the process—if he could manage it.

  When Tech realized that his thoughts had begun to trail off into daydreams, he retrieved the notebook and woke it up. He was halfway into a second sentence for the essay when Fidelia Temper's shrill voice found its way through the room's closed door.

  “And another thing,” the group home counselor was saying, “there'll be no more TV time in the common room until you demonstrate to me that you can pick up after yourself and lend a hand around here for a change.”

  Marz rapped a code on the door and Tech told him to come in.

  Marz gave him a secret smile as he entered. Most of Fidelia remained in the hall, but she craned her thin neck through the doorway far enough to direct a suspicious look at Tech.

  “Working on your extra assignments, Jesse?” she asked, fairly basking in the question.

  He peered at her over the laptop's screen. “I live for homework.”

  She ignored the remark and glanced around the room in dismay. “You know, we used to have a name for places like this.”

  “Power spots,” Tech said.

  “Mad-scientist laboratories,” Marz chimed in.

  “Pig sties!” Fidelia said with high-pitched indignation. “And let me tell you something. If you care at all about your futures, you'll stay as far away from that data detective as you can get.”

  “Better a dead end with Felix than a future with the Bride of Frankenstein,” Tech muttered.

  Fidelia opened her mouth to reply, but words evidently failed her, and she slammed the door.

  Tech frowned, but Marz's smile only broadened.

  “Marz…” Tech said quietly. “I know that look. Spill it.”

  Marz fished a minidisk from the breast pocket of his T-shirt and held it between his thumb and fore-finger. “The backup file of the EPA run. I managed to reconstruct some of it.”

  Tech leaped off the bed. “You rule! Let me see!”

  Marz coin-flipped the mini to Tech, who immediately slotted the disk into the laptop.

  “Man, you shoulda seen what I had to go through to decode even part of it,” Marz boasted.

  His eyes glued to the laptop screen, Tech could barely contain his excitement. “You are a friggin’ gen-ee-us!” An alphanumeric jumble began to scroll on the screen, then the image of the blue gremlin appeared, and its high-pitched, youthfully eager voice issued from the computer's small speakers, repeating in a loop.

  “MSTRNTS. MSTRNTS will know what to do.”

  Tech highlighted the short run of capitalized text that accompanied the image in a dialogue balloon and copied it to a separate file. When it was clear that the remainder of the download contained nothing more than indecipherable code, Tech opened the text file and studied the words.

  “What's a ‘MSTRNTS’?”

  “Could be a she,” Marz said.

  “A she?”

  Marz reached over Tech's shoulder, moved the cursor, unlocked the caps key, and inserted a period and space. “Ms. Trents. See?”

  Tech laughed through his nose. “Like the letters on a vanity license plate.”

  “Might even be a vanity plate.”

  Tech considered it briefly. “Then why not Ms. Trants, or Ms. Tronts. Or even Ms. T. Rents?”

  “Okay,” Marz conceded. “But those still make her a she.”

  “Not necessarily,” Tech said, typing. “If it's like a vanity tag, then maybe m-s-t-r is short for ‘mister.’ “

  Marz plucked his lower lip. “Mr. Nats, Nets …”

  “Nits, Nots,” Tech completed. “Could be any one of them, or something completely different. Maybe there's another hint in the download. We could run it through Codebreaker, or we could bring the mini to one of the cypherpunks down-town.”

  “We could,” Marz said slowly, “but I think our little blue gremlin is already telling us what to do: Bring it to ‘MSTRNTS.’ “

  They stared at the letters for a long while.

  “Ms. Tree Nuts?” they asked each other at the same time. Tech punched Marz in the arm and broke out laughing.

  As long as they were together, life didn't suck.

  Felix sat staring at the flashing countdown icon he had moved to the corner of the office's main-display screen—the only screen that was still working. Felix had exactly sixteen hours ten minutes to settle up with Network Security and the EPA, or Data Disco
veries would be history.

  “How much money do I owe in fines?” he asked the computer.

  “$28,865,” the system replied in an electronic monotone.

  “Twenty-eight thousand?” Felix mumbled in disbelief.

  Most of that amount was in interest, springing from unpaid vehicular emission-control and garbage-recycling violations. He refused to even think about his soon-to-be-overdue rent and insurance payments.

  “How much is in the account?” he asked at last. “$301.27.”

  Hopeless, Felix thought. He supposed he could throw himself on the mercy of the court and plead for a week's extension, but what good would a week do?

  He was angry with Jess and Marshall for adding to his financial woes, but he couldn't blame them entirely. He was the one who had allowed the fines to pile up and compound. The boys had deserved the dressing down they had received, but Felix already missed them and feared being estranged from them even more than being put out of business.

  He let go a prolonged exhale that marked an official end to the day that was supposed to have been the first day of his new life. Then he activated the office answering machine, which told him that he had had three calls—better than three times the usual number, zero.

  All three were routine requests from people who had fallen prey to the complexity of modern life. One woman's money-market funds had disappeared overnight. The bank claimed to have an e-authorization for withdrawal, but the woman claimed that she had sent no such authorization. A second woman had purchased a round-trip travel package to Tibet only to end up incarcerated in the capital city for not being able to show a prebooked return flight. A father of three was looking for his eldest son who had left home with all of dad's ATM and credit cards.

  He rubbed his eyes as he regarded the screen. None of the cases would pay much, but they would at least help cover the fines.

  Precisely at 8:00 P.M. the private videophone line intruded with a series of tones. The caller obviously had access to Felix's personal number, so odds were in favor of the call being legitimate and not an attempt to get him to switch his long-distance service or donate to Casualties of the Stock-Market Crash.