CYBERNATION
fe web, and he was the guy who was going to track them i and stop them.
obviously didn’t know who they were messing
ttfce Bon Chance
fire scenario was okay, but overblown. Jay had al- been too gaudy about such things, spending too time on how good something looked when he have been concentrating on how well it worked. : and not substance.
ill, as Keller stood there in his fireman’s gear, watch; Jay work, he had to give him credit. He was sniffing i right direction.
waited until Jay went past, heading for the i of the “fire.” Maybe he could figure something out, ; not, but he wasn’t going to get the chance. Keller 1 Jay up the stairwell, being careful to stay out of , tracking him by the sound of his boots on the steps. Jay was on the right floor, Keller moved in. It i dark, smoky, hot, all in all, a pretty good represen- a, as such things went. Jay was always big on details. : that was the curse of a small picture man, wasn’t it? I’t see the forest for the trees hi the way. No longi vision.
m a cabinet near the door, Keller pulled a thermite shaped like a bowling ball. He triggered the timer ten seconds, then rolled it across the floor toward the i Jay Gridley. Heard Jay stop and listen. 1 you later, Jay. You lose this round. ‘, bomb went off in a flare that destroyed the scenario (< Keller dropped out of VR and back into his cabin on (Bon Chance. He pulled off the sensory gear, laughing, i never had an opponent like me, Jay. I know all your moves. You don't have a prayer." 11 Oh the Bon Chance An old man, maybe seventy-five or so, sat in a recliner in a low-rent room, pointing a remote at a battered television set, pushing buttons, but getting only scrambled, frantic pixels whirling on his screen. A deep, masculine voice said, 'Tired of losing your net service? Unable to log onto the web because your server can't get its act together?" Hie old man clicked the remote a couple more times, men shook his head and tossed the control onto a scratched table next to the worn and scuffed leather recliner. A big, happy-looking German shepherd padded over to the old man. In his mouth, the dog held another remote, a silvery, glittering, truncated cone-shaped device. The old man looked at the dog, who dropped the device into his lap and gave him a dog smile. 93 CYBERNATION t's this, boy?" the old man said, dog gave one sharp bark, old man picked up the remote. i opening notes for Strauss's "Thus Spake Zarathu- began playing quietly in the background, deep voice said, "We at CyberNation understand frustration. And we have a guarantee-if you are kept off the net for more than an hour on a rNation server, we'll not only give you your money for that entire month, we'll give you your next of service absolutely free." music grew louder. Boom-boomboom-boomn-boom... ' old man looked at the dog and raised one eyebrow stion. The dog barked once, and it was obvious : he was saying. "Go for it!" to CyberNation, we are always here for you, twenty hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, i have our word on that, and we put our money where Imouth is." old man pointed the remote at his television set. music's volume increased so that it rumbled over i old man and dog as if a full symphony orchestra was next room. set morphed, changed into a giant window that nded to cover the entire wall. People stepped out and the shabby living room. There was an Indian holy in a turban and long flowing white robe; a black i in a grass skirt, bare from the waist up; a cowboy; | Arctic explorer; a big-game hunter. In addition, a rhino, i ostrich, and a small dinosaur stepped from the window the suddenly expanded living room. All of them to get along famously. ; music reached its peak, thundering Strauss, horns ng their dramatic sting. "Anywhere, anytime, anybody you want to be- rNation can take you there. Come along. Join the lions of satisfied citizens of the net in mankind's 94 NET FORCE greatest experiment. The future is waiting for you." The old man and dog both smiled as the music faded. "What do you think?" Chance said. Roberta said, "An old man and a dog?" "Not everybody goes for the sex ads," she said. "Dogs are always good. You know the old story about the book title?" 'Berto shook his head. "Well, the theory is, people like dogs. They also like Abraham Lincoln and they like their doctors, for the most part. So a book title that would guarantee instant sales would be Abraham Lincoln's Doctor's Dog." 'Berto smiled. "It's all about demographics. We catch a lot of the young male computer geeks with the sex come-ons. But we also have specific ads tailored for generation Xers, aging baby boomers turning into AARPers, young mothers, as many large groups as we can identify and niche- market to. Net, TV, radio, print ads, movie trailers, billboards, bus benches, sports sponsorships-everything from T-shirts to signs on racing cars-high school cable ed, you name it. Since the Blue Whale scramble, we've picked up eighty-eight thousand new subscribers on the U.S. West Coast alone." "That's good, right?" "Not as good as we'd hoped. The Net Force ops got in and patched things up faster than we expected. We should have gotten twice that many new linkers." He shrugged again. "So?" 'Truth is, things aren't moving along as quickly as we want. We are falling short of our projections. It looks as if we are going to have to ... step things up." "More ads? More software scrambles?" She looked at him. Butter wouldn't melt in his mouth. "Don't pull my chain, Roberta." He chuckled. "You have a new piercing you haven't told me about, Missy?" 95 CYBERNATION "Screw you." "I'm ready when you are." She smiled. Well. He had his charms, even when he ayed at being duller than he was ... t Force HQ tico, Virginia in Net Force sweats and cross-trainers, John award stood under one of the chinning bars at the oh- cle course, rotating his head slowly to stretch the mus- i of his neck. Physical training was another thing he'd eked off on during his short-lived retirement. Not that e'd stopped completely-he'd kept up morning calis- , and he still hit the weights down in the basement couple times a week, plus he jogged most days for a miles; still, he hadn't run the course in almost a nth, and normally he'd do it at least twice a week. Probably he'd lost a couple of steps, but not that much. He jumped up, caught the steel bar, palms forward and titly wider than his shoulders, and started doing chins, knew after the first couple that his usual twelve or en routine was out of the question. By the fifth one, was straining, and it was all he could do to gut out Hen. He was glad Julio Femandez was not here to see this. pf he had been, Howard would have had to find three or four more reps somewhere, and like as not, he'd have | pulled a muscle doing 'em. He let himself hang for a few seconds after the tenth rep, to stretch out his lats, then dropped to the ground, ^disgusted with himself. Who was it-Gertrude Stein?- i who'd said that after you hit forty it's all patch, patch, (patch? Didn't matter who said it, it was sure true. On the one hand, he still felt like a kid of nineteen. Yeah, his hairline 96 NET FORCE showed a little more face than it used to and there were little tufts of gray at the temples. But there weren't too many wrinkles, and his general shape and weight wasn't that different from twenty, twenty-five years ago. If anything, he'd put on some muscle since his first hitch in the regular army. But the days of partying all night and then working a full day were gone. The occasional strain or bruise took longer to heal, and if he didn't stretch and warm up before he started working out hard, he got a lot more strains and bruises than he had as a kid. He thought he'd come to terms with getting older and slowing down, but he realized that didn't mean he could slack off. He wasn't going to get any younger or stronger, but if he didn't stay on top of things, he was going to get older and weaker a lot sooner. A layoff like this just pointed out what he knew was so-you might not be able to win in the end, but you were going to get there quicker if you didn't resist it every step of the way.