Cyberdrome Read Free

but I can do it myself.”
    As she picked up his
coffee cup and began cleaning up the mess, he pressed the help button on his
wrist computer. His powerchair partly deflated the big smart-rubber ball it
used for locomotion and extended several balancing booms while it lowered
itself down to the floor. He pulled himself in and with a whirl of gyroscopes;
the chair reinflated the ball and righted itself.
    Nervous applause
came from some of the onlookers. They had obviously never seen a powerchair
like his before. With all the recent medical advances there were very few
people confined to wheelchairs anymore—at least in developed countries. His
powerchair was a little old fashioned, but in the three years since his
near-fatal car crash, it had made his life almost bearable. Almost.
    “You’re lucky,” he
remembered his fiancée, Maya, telling him after he woke from a month-long coma.
    “You call this
lucky?” he said bitterly, pointing to his apparently useless legs.
    “They repaired the
damage to your head and face while you were unconscious. There’s not a single
scar left.”
    “They said I have
permanent brain damage,” he reminded her.
    “Only a small part
of your brain was affected.”
    “Yeah—just the small
part that controls my legs. I had a soccer scholarship. What am I going to do
now?”
    “You were run over
by a truck, Alek,” she said. “It could’ve been much worse.”
    “Worse than being
told that they can’t do anything for you? That you will never kick a ball
again? Never walk again?”
    “There’s stem-cell
therapy and cybernetic—”
    “They use stem-cells
to regrow nerves and cybernetics to replace limbs—neither does me any good.”
    “You’re alive,” she
said.
    “Am I?” he
remembered yelling at her—repeatedly. She had no response. A few weeks after
the hospital released him, he stopped answering her calls. A month later, she
stopped calling.
    “Sorry I wasn’t in
earlier,” Cheryl said, bringing him back to the present. “My stupid car
wouldn’t start this morning.”
    “That figures,” he
said, shaking his head. “And I suppose you have no idea who Stacy is, do you?”
When she looked confused, he added. “Never mind, and thanks for cleaning up the
mess for me, Cheryl.”
    “No problem. Let me
go get you another coffee. Just try to keep this one on the table, okay?” she
added with a polite smile.
    As she turned and
walked away, he ran his hands underneath his table. As expected, he found a
small lump on the side where Stacy had been standing. He pried it off the table
and examined it.
    It was a Piggyback
module all right—originally designed to allow two people to share one interface
signal. They also allowed one person to eavesdrop on another if you knew how to
modify them. Very few did, of course, which confirmed that Stacy wasn’t just
some hacker working for Klaxon—Stacy was Klaxon.
    He smacked the top
of the table. What an idiot—falling for the girl with the see-through top. How
the hell was he going to explain this? He stuffed the module into his backpack
and then saw a familiar face on the TV screen up in the corner. He signaled his
watch to turn up his personal sound.
    “It was one year ago
today that the genetically-engineered virus broke through its quarantine in
Utah’s Salt Lake Biomedical Research Facility,” the reporter said, “killing
over 9,000 people in the first few hours. The CDC admits that while authorities
have been able to contain the microscopic machines that carry the plague, they
have not yet found a way to destroy them.
    “The research lab’s
parent company, Cyberdrome—the Nevada-based ‘Think Tank’ well-known for its
pioneering work in nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, and other
next-generation fields—has never admitted direct responsibility for either the
outbreak or the deaths. Speaking from the company’s Groom Lake headquarters,
Cyberdrome’s Chief Administrator, Rebecca Leconte, told us that founder,