Read Memories End for Free Online Page A

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