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Toby wants to say that a lot of it has been so far, but she refrains: it's not fair to demand the whole story and then object to it, she does realize that. "Okay, fire away," she says.
"After Katrina WooWoo disappeared from the Floating World, old Slaight of Hand wandered away in search of another Miss Direction, and maybe a more aesthetically attractive performance space that wasn't falling into the water. I was at loose ends, which was most likely good, since - being on the lookout for the next best thing, with eyes open and ears pricked - I noticed a couple of guys hanging around who were making too much of an effort to fit in, riffraff-wise. You can tell when a man is new to his greasy ponytail, his raggedy 'stache, and his garish nose jewellery: too much face fiddling. And their pants were wrong. They hadn't made the mistake of new ones, like Chuck, but their rips and tears and smears were too artful. Or that was my judgment. So I was on the next Truck-A-Pillar I could hitch a ride with.
"This time I went all the way down to Mexico. I figured that whatever tentacles the Rev could stretch out weren't likely to reach that far."
The Hackery
There was a surplus of paranoid drug peddlers in Mexico who assumed that Zeb was a paranoid drug peddler too, and that their interests clashed with his. After a few too many episodes in which men with arcane tattoos and designs of tulips razored onto their scalps gave him the full frontal scowl, plus a couple of near-misses with knives to make things clear, he moved down the map, shedding spare change all the way. For incidentals he paid cash only: he didn't want to leave a cybertrail, even the cybertrail of someone named John and then Roberto and then Diaz.
From Cozumel he hopped through the Caribbean Islands, then over to Colombia. But although he further honed the skill of drinking with strangers in bars, and survived those lessons and a few others, nothing in Bogota held any possibilities for him; in addition to which, he stood out too much.
Rio was another story. Its nickname then was The Hackery; that was before the mini-drone raids and the electrical-grid sabotage events that sent the truly serious operators - those who'd survived - into the Cambodian jungles to set up shop anew. But Rio then was at its zenith. It was said to be the Wild West of the web, filled with youthful bristle-faced blackhat cyberhustlers of every possible nationality. There were hordes of potential customers: businesses were spying on businesses, politicians were setting nets for other politicians, and then there were the military interests: these paid the most of all, though they also did a moderately full security check on prospective employees, and Zeb didn't want that. But all in all, Rio was a seller's market: quick hands for hire, no questions asked, and no matter what you looked like you'd blend in down there as long as you looked odd enough.
He was out of practise keyboard-wise, considering the time he'd spent slinging meat, aiding Slaight of Hand, ogling Miss Direction, and python-wrestling, but it didn't take him long to get his flexibility back. Then he went looking for work. He found an opening suitable to his talents within a week.
His first employer was Ristbones, an outfit that specialized in the hacking of electronic voting machines. That had been easy in the first decade of the century, and also profitable - if you controlled the machines, you could slip in whichever candidate you wanted, as long as the real vote was close to being split - but outrage had been expressed and fusses had been made, and the appearance of democracy was still considered worth preserving back then; so firewalls had been installed and the pickwork was now more complex.
It was also boring - sort of like crocheting, working through the fairly elementary lacework that was more for show than for actual prevention. You could zizz off on the job trying to interest yourself. So when he had an offer from Hacksaw Inc. he took it, a little too rapidly as it turned out. He wasn't drunk at the time, but vodka was involved. That, and a lot of backslapping and loud comradely laughs and compliments. The pickup was made by three suave guys, one with large hands and another with large money. The third was probably the eliminator: he didn't say much.
Hacksaw was located on a joyboat moored off Rio and posing as an anything-goes sex bazaar. Not just a pose, either, because you could get everything there from chicken soup to nuts, on or off the bone, screams-for-sale extra. He spent a nervous four weeks on that deathstar working for a pod of seedy Russian pussy-smugglers who were tiring of the whininess and bleediness and need-to-feed of their human merchandise and were aiming to supplement their income in ways that required less soft tissue. They put Zeb to work hacking into online PachinkoPoker for skimming purposes, and it was a mite stressful because - said the other code slaves - the Hacksaw folk were known to heave you into the luminous krill if they thought you were taking too long unravelling the digital embroidery.
Or else if you were befriending the software. Misusing it was fine, so long as not much in the way of merchandise was damaged, since damage was a privilege reserved for paying customers. A few weekly free-time coupons for hackstaff were included in the paypacket, along with some complimentary gambling chips and the meals and drinks. But sentimental attachments were strictly off-limits.
The sex bazaar side of the Hacksaw business was beyond tawdry; especially the kids, they were lifting them from the favelas on a limited-time-use basis, turning them over, and fishfooding them at a fast clip. That part was too close to the Rev and his child-rearing practises for Zeb's tastes, and he must've let that show because the cordiality of the jovial comrades was waning rapidly. After working only a month of his contract he'd managed to sneak a go-fast boat by sharing a few vodkas with the Russian guard and then whacking him and pocketing his identity and overboarding him. That was the first time he'd killed anyone, and it was too bad for the guard, a non-too-bright bullet-head who should've known better than to trust a callow though not small and - by definition, considering he was working for Hacksaw - devious youth like Zeb.
He took a few lines of Hacksaw code with him, and a few passwords. Those could come in handy. He also took one of the girls. He'd sweet-talked her into acting as his very own Miss Direction: he used his coupons to book an hour of her time, then got her to walk past the booze-addled guard i
n what passed for her nightie - some shred of cheeseclothy fabric - looking just seductive enough and just furtive enough - Where you going? - to get the coconut-brain to turn his head.
Zeb could have left the girl on the joyboat, but he felt sorry for her. The comrades would figure out that she'd acted the decoy, wittingly or unwittingly they wouldn't care, and they'd mash her like a potato. She was only on the boat because she'd been lured away from her home town in rustbucket Michigan by spurious enticements and a few chunks of third-rate flattery. She'd been told she had talent; she'd been told the job was dancing.
He hadn't been so thick as to take the go-fast boat to a regular marina. The comrades might already have noticed the two absences - three, including the guard - and be on the prowl. He docked at one of the shore hotels and hid the girl behind an ornamental fountain until he could gain entrance to the corridors by booking a room with the guard's identity. Then he worked out the master code, snuck into a well-stocked bedroom, and lifted some clothes for her, and a shirt for himself as well: too small, but he rolled up the sleeves. He left a threatening Miss Direction note scrawled on the bathroom mirror in soap: I Come Back Later. Revenge. Chances were that nine-tenths of the guys staying in places like that would have at least one violent and resentful thug in their past, and would thus leave the hotel rapidly without complaining about their missing wardrobe items.
Or their car keys. Or their car.
Once they were far enough away, he found a net cafe where he could lilypad to one of his .09 per cent secret stashes, then transfer a lump of that to a different account and pay it out to himself; after which, he erased all traces. Then he borrowed another car that just happened to be available. People were careless.
So far, so good; but then there was the girl. Her name was Minta, which made him think of organic chewing gum. Fresh, green. She'd held firm during their escape, she hadn't lost her nerve, she'd been silent. Most likely she'd also been in shock, because she hadn't lasted. There was decay from the inside, whether mental or physical he couldn't tell.
She was all right when they were in view, on the street or in a store - she could act normal for short periods - but when they were inside, in this room or that room or even in a car, zigzagging their way north and west, she would spend the time at her two specialties, crying hopelessly and staring vacantly. Television was no distraction for her, nor was sex. Understandably enough she didn't want Zeb to touch her, though out of gratitude and as a form of payment she offered anything he might want in the way of his being touched himself.
"So you took her up on it?" Toby says, keeping her voice light. How can she be jealous of such a wreck, such a wraith?
"No, as a matter of fact," Zeb says. "No joy in that. Might as well hire a prostibot wank robot in a mall. It was more fun for me to tell her she didn't have to. After that she did let me hug her a little. I thought it might calm her down, but it only made her shiver."
Minta started hearing things - stealthy footsteps, heavy breathing, a metallic clanking sound - and she was frightened every time she went out of whatever squalid hotel room they were staying in. Zeb could have afforded classier lodgings, but it was better to keep to the deep pleeblands, in the shadows.
Sad to say, Minta ended by jumping off a balcony in San Diego. He wasn't in the room at the time, he'd been out getting her a coffee, but he saw the crowd gathering and heard the siren. Which meant he had to leave town in a hurry to avoid the investigation, if any; which in turn meant that his description might be top of the list as a murder suspect, supposing the authorities decided to follow up, which increasingly they didn't. Anyway, where would they start? Minta had no identity. He'd abandoned nothing of his - he made a point of taking everything with him whenever he left a room - but who knows if there were security cameras anywhere near? Not likely in the pleeb shadowlands, but you never knew.
He made it up to Seattle, where he took a quick peek into the Birth of Venus zephyr dropbox he shared with Adam. There was a message for him: "Confirm you're still in the body." Adam sometimes echoed the Rev's speech patterns in a creepy way.
"In whose body?" Zeb posted in reply.
It was an old joke of his: he always used to make fun of that pious no-longer-in-the-body funeral talk of the Rev's. He made that joke so Adam would know it was really him, not some decoy impersonator. In fact, Adam had most likely planted that in-body query on purpose because he'd know Zeb couldn't resist it; whereas a fake Zeb would just give a straight answer. Adam was usually a few twists ahead of the curve.
His next move was up to Whitehorse. He'd heard about Bearlift in a Rio bar and figured it would be a good place to hide out, since nobody would be expecting him to go there. Not Hacksaw, who had a score to settle: they'd look for him in some other hackers' hotspot, such as Goa. And not the Rev either: Zeb had never shown the least interest in wildlife.
"So that," says Zeb, "is how I wound up on the Mackenzie Mountain Barrens wearing a bear skin, and jumping onto a trail biker, and getting mistaken for Bigfoot the Sasquatch."
