Rood | Page 6

remember? When I was a kid I could
never get the hang of writing a 'y'. I always wrote it as an 'x'. Teachers
used to give me hell, for a while. Called me 'Tonx' to make fun of me,
to try to shame me into playing by the rules. So I did, for while. Now I
don't. So... Tonx."
Fed forced a laugh, his chuckle sounding fake even to his own ears.
"That's cool, Tony - Tonx. That's cool."
Tonx's smile widened and he pushed a strand of greasy black hair
behind one ear, a thick malachite talon arching from the lobe. He
jumped out of the chair and grabbed a big black thermoelectric hoody
off its back. Pulling it over his sleeveless white tee he shuffled by the
edge of the scratched metal desk.
"Let's get some lunch," he said to Fed, "we've got some catching up to
do."
Two hours later Fed was full of beer and stir-fry, picking little crunchy
bits of fried tofu out of his teeth with the splintered remains of his
disposable chopstick. He was regaling Tony - Tonx, he reminded
himself - with tales of his 'sploits, explaining some of the new code he
was seeing in the newsgroups these days, how cool it all was. The beer
made his head swim. He'd only been drunk a few times and hadn't liked
it, but his brother had ordered for them and he had been afraid of
looking stupid. Tonx was listening to everything he said with the same
rapt attention Fed remembered, nodding his head as he shoveled down
his stir-fry.
"So then I got the idea of forcing the compile on the captured machine.
I mean, where better? You're already leeching cycles off them for the
scans and port postings and everything else. Everybody's got a
connection to at least one or two peer-to-peer networks, and this way

you can anonymously pull down the libraries you need. It adds
additional routes to the data vectors they have to backtrack, and allows
you to control the programming by modularizing it."
"But doesn't your initial access point have to stay open?" asked Tonx.
"No. That's the beauty of it. The compile is set to use the same memory
space as the access logs. So the initial compile erases your tracks right
from the start, and uses the same execution levels as your logging
daemons. It reads like a port scan being logged, or firewall intrusion
attempt by some clueless newbie."
"Clever" conceded Tonx. "Very clever." He belched and leaned back,
folding his hands over his belly. He looked over Fed's shoulder into the
middle distance and ran his tongue over his teeth, working loose a
piece of sweet-n-sour pork. "Good to see you've been keeping busy."
"Busy?" asked Fed, "It's the hottest fucking virus that's ever hit the
'Nets, and I've almost completely reverse engineered it. That's more
than busy, man."
Tonx put his plastic sandals on the edge of the table and wiggled his
toes for a moment. "Got to get rid of these babies," he muttered to
himself. He looked up at Fed, and shrugged.
"What does that mean?" asked Fed.
"What about your regular coursework?" Tonx asked.
"Oh. That's fine. It's a hassle, learning all the legacy shit, is all. I don't
see the point if you're not going to use any of it. Nobody these days
does their own garbage collection, and any modern language can
handle all the pointer stuff for you."
"Seems kind of counterproductive spending all your free time reverse
engineering viruses if what you're really after is getting a spot in a
corp" said Tonx. "I mean, doesn't security development have more to
do with prevention than attack?"

"That's stupid," said Fed. "Of course you have to understand the
virus-writing side."
"So...?" Tonx drawled, leaving the question hanging in the air.
Fed realized he was sitting on the edge of his chair, one elbow in a nest
of napkins filthy with stir-fry and soy sauce. He jerked his arm back
and slid fully onto his chair.
Tony had taught him to code, gotten him hooked on the underground
newsgroups and chat rooms using their Dad's pass codes to get around
the "Parental control" lock filters that came with their school-issue
laptops. That was back when his Dad was still around, or as close to
around as he'd ever been. Tony had steered Fed through the basic 'Net
protocols, started him on his first shell scripts, gotten him involved. It
was because of Tony that Fed had developed any interest in coding at
all, and although Tony had ended up going for biologicals he'd never,
ever, stopped pushing Fed to produce the best, tightest, cleanest code
he could. And now he was asking him why.
"What are you