My left arm started to hum softly. I hated when it did that, dropping into some kind of self-diagnostic routine when its central processor figured it had the time. (The spirits alone knew what it did while I was asleep at night.) The sound was very soft, probably inaudible from two meters away, but I always reacted to it the way I would to an alarm clock going off next to my ear. I clenched my left fist strongly a couple of times, and the whirring sound shut itself off.

Silently, I gave thanks to the fine people at Wiremaster Incorporated. That whirring sound from my arm-they might call it a diagnostic routine; I called it a wake-up call, a reminder that I was living in the real world. I sighed.

Well, since I had the telecom all powered up, I might as well get some work done. I pulled out the datachip Sharon Young had given me in The Buffalo Jump, slipped it into the telecom's socket, and pulled up the data.

Lots of data, I realized, as it scrolled rapidly off the top of the screen. I cut off the flow of text, specified a more reasonable scroll rate, and repunched the display command.

Jonathan Bridge, this is your life. Almost instantly, I got a better understanding of just why Sharon Young was hiring me. She had a lot of background info here-date of birth, family history, Sioux passport number, partial match of his SIN, even summaries of his transcripts from elementary school. Spot checks of his financial picture, dating back more than ten years-almost a third of the slag's life. The full trip. Obviously, somebody had seriously had their way with the poor, trusting computer in the Sioux's central citizenship registry. I scanned the data again. Pro work, no doubt about it Working for a solid week, popping wake-ups like candy, I might-barely, if the Great Spirits of data processing smiled down on me-be able to rape the system for this kind of personal data.

But that's all it was, just data. Numbers, facts, bits and bytes. You'd think that people would understand it, in this computer-driven world of ours, but not many do. Data isn't information; data is facts. Information resides in the interconnections, the interrelations between facts. Like, putting together the fact that water boils at 100 degrees Celsius, and the fact that sodium melts at 98 degrees, to extract the information that sodium isn't a good material for making tea kettles.

What Young wanted from me, obviously, was to take the facts that some other researcher-much better at the brute-level stuff than me-had generated, and turn them into some overall sense of friend Jonathan Bridge. That involved sorting through the reams of facts on the datachip, looking for correlations-in time, in space, and in many other more theoretical "axes" (like "financial solvency")-and contradictions. In other words, the interconnections between the numbers. Take an example: Mr. Bridge was flat busted in June 2050, left Cheyenne, and returned in August to pay off a rather large bank loan with a single credit transfer. Conclusion? His business trip out of town had obviously paid off big time. That sort of thing.

Back in the Bad Old Days, I'd have had to do most of the grunt work myself… or, if I wanted to stay true to the hard-boiled-gumshoe archetype, hire a leggy brunette with a sharp tongue and soft heart to do it for me. Today, smartframes and search demons can get the job done faster than any brash-talking secretary, making up in efficiency what they lack in sex appeal. A change for the better? You tell me.

I sat back and stretched. My shoulders were knotted, and a throbbing headache had taken up residence in my left eye. I pushed my chair back from the telecom and checked my finger-watch.

Twenty-three hundred hours, give or take. That meant I'd put in about four solid hours on the machine, whipping up the smartframes and search routines I'd soon be letting loose on Jonathan Bridge. I shook my head-stopped when the headache made its displeasure known.

I wondered what my father would think if he could see the use to which I was putting my aborted university education? Nothing good, I was sure. I sighed. A lot had changed since I'd bailed out of the computer science program at U-Dub- the state of the art waits for no man-but at least I understood some of the basics, a thorough enough grounding on which I could build.

And build I had since I'd left Seattle. I was no "sheer"- one of those bleeding-edge console cowboys who shave black ice for the pure quivering thrill of it-but I'd turned myself into a pretty fair code-jockey. I didn't chase down data as such; let the slicers beat their neurons against corporate glaciers if that was their idea of fun. In contrast, though, I was starting to build a reasonable rep for turning the raw paydata that others collected into usable information. I'd learned just what kind of resources were available out there on the Matrix-open to all comers, or with minimal security-and just how to make best use of them. It was just another extension of the rule by which I'd been living my life since arriving in Cheyenne: No Exposure.

A lot of the learning had been on my own, downloading texts, digital magazines, and even academic papers from the Matrix. When hypertext hadn't been enough, I'd sought out a couple of the eminences grises of Cheyenne's "virtual tribes"-aging deckers who didn't have the reflexes to shave ice anymore, but who kept up with the theory because it was all that was left for them. I guess some of my "professors" had seen some potential in me for the trade, because they'd tried to pressure me into going under the laser for a datajack. Okay, granted, I could see their point: Even for the kind of code-slinging I was doing tonight, a datajack would have made the job so much quicker. Fingers on a keyboard are no match for direct neural connections.

I couldn't do it, though. It wasn't weak-kneed queasiness over surgery, which I'm sure was their interpretation. My reservations were far more concrete, though I couldn't tell anyone about them: I simply didn't trust myself enough. Even though I'd tried to keep myself isolated from that facet of the shadows, I'd learned early on that some Cheyenne chipmeisters were dealing in 2XS chips. A source of 2XS, plus a direct feed into my brain? I've always prided myself on strong will, chummer, but I'm not that strong…

Again I shook my head, and to hell with the headache.

This seemed to be my evening for morbid thoughts. I scanned my code creation one last time, pointed it toward the greater Matrix, and keyed in the electronic equivalent of "Fetch!"

And that was the first part of my contract for Sharon Young, complete. There wasn't much for me to do until my smartframe-mentally I'd dubbed it Naomi, for various personal reasons-returned with the correlations it had generated. That would be maybe an hour, I figured-which would probably sound ridiculous to nonprogrammers: spend four hours writing a program that runs for one hour, and that I'll never use again. Normally I'd agree; I've always considered any meal that takes longer to prepare than it does to eat to be a bad allocation of resources. This time, though, it was the only route that made sense. Doing the same sort of search manually would have taken several times the five hours-four coding, one waiting-I was investing in the smartframe. Don't work harder, as one of my old U-Dub profs had screamed at me, work smarter.

Good advice. I went to bed.