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others. He paid the price of dinner for two at any fine restaurant in Paris and collected the sunglasses and a little white cigarette. He crossed the street to the small cafe there; the Mucha Cafe. He sat outside despite the cold, admiring the crowd gathered there. The view was fine. He lit his cigarette, and put on the sunglasses.
    The lasers in the glasses were a shock after using his headset for so long; they were not tuned to his particular corneal pattern and took much longer than he felt was necessary to map the back of his eyeballs. His eyes watered and he choked briefly on the harsh smoke as nausea chewed at his belly. Suddenly the sounds of the crowd around him cracked into focus; the cool touch of a tear on his cheek felt reassuring, and the cold seeping through his collar rolled sweetly across his neck. The drugs in the cigarette had kicked in. Just then a prompt appeared floating over the Seine, asking for a channel. A timer flickered into view superimposed over the table next to him, a bright pink character indicating the minutes left before his encrypted wireless connection would cease to exist. Given the lag in the timer's appearance Poulpe guessed the entire process was being tunneled out to some third-world organization.
    Poulpe reclined into his chair. He smiled broadly, and launched an email client. He began to write.

Chapter 8
     
    Fede went home just before Tonx started practice. He caught the train out of downtown and made it to the housing park just as the last bus rolled out. No one was in. His Mom had left a voice memo on the fridge's comp that she was out with Bark, that he was treating her to a night on the town. He took a pizza out of the freezer, realized the ancient appliance was filthy. Knew that it had always been filthy. Once his pizza was hot he took it from the microwave and, as an afterthought, grabbed a beer from the back of the fridge. The beginning of the day seemed far away, a distant history as he rolled down the hall from the kitchen to his room.
    He fell into his chair and swiveled around. The place seemed suddenly tiny, childish. Charts of old scripting languages were tacked to the wall, yellow stickies with IP addresses for long-gone servers peppering their edges. His desk lamp leaned crooked against one corner, its spring broken, hinges splinted with duct tape. The stacks of books on the edge of his desk sat leaden, unopenable. They were all entrance exam aids. All of them.
    Fede finished his pizza and clicked off the lamp. He crawled up onto the top bunk and lay staring at the ceiling. The Beowulf cluster in the bunk below hummed quietly, the tiny red and yellow LEDs casting dim shadows against the wall across from him. Fed sighed gently and sat up before pulling off his legs. He took a jar of silicone lube from a crack between the mattress and the bed and applied it to his prosthetics' vulnerable joints, his fingers working deftly in the dark. When he was done he set them aside and massaged a tube of gel over his stumps, kneading the thickened tissue there back into pliability. There was nothing but the sound of his breathing, the hum of the fans in the machines beneath him.
    Tonx's idea was amazing, was the coolest bio hack he'd ever heard of, and Fede wanted in on it. He knew he could pull together a virus that could get them the computing power they needed, knew it like a cold hard lump inside his head. A certainty that this chance was his.
    And right there beside it was the fear; if he took this on he'd be out of school, dropped off his fast track to the big schools like a kitten from a car on the interstate. Bailing out for no good reason would be noted, his sudden absence ascribed to drugs use or, even worse, an inability to cope with the stress. Even if he came back he'd have to struggle against it.
    Fede realized he was breathing fast, stopped and pulled down some deep breaths.
    He could always claim medical problems. Say he had a growth spurt that landed him in a