He was not gassy.

"Hello! And welcome to your new computer!" the image said to Creek as soon as he switched on the new computer. The image was of a young man in breeches, a plain long coat, and a Quaker hat. "I am your personal intelligent agent, sponsored by America Online. Call me Todd. Activate me and receive forty-five days FREE access to America Online, Earth's oldest and largest continually active network."

Creek smirked at the hopeful agent imprinted onto his monitor glasses. "Hello, Todd," he said to the intelligent agent "Show me your source code, please."

"My source code is the intellectual property of America Online and its parent company, Quaker Oats Holdings," Todd said. "I'm afraid I'm not allowed to divulge it to my individual user. But when you activate your America Online account with forty-five days FREE access, I'll be happy to retrieve information on open source intelligent agents, although I can guarantee they're not as good as I am, when combined with America Online's unbeatable suite of content and services!"

"Oh, I believe you, Todd. Unfortunately, I don't have time for that," Creek said, and from the storage cube he'd set alongside his new rig, activated the stripper program that froze the intelligent agent and disabled the alert message that would speed its way back to AOL's servers. "Bye, Todd," Creek said.

"I will be avenged!" Todd said, before it froze up completely. This got another smirk from Creek; Todd's programmers, knowing that it would inevitably be hacked, thought enough to leave a parting message to the hacker; a kind of salute, as it were. A window popped up in the monitor glasses, spilling Todd's source code at a high rate.

Creek scanned it cursorily. The late, unlamented Todd was correct It was a pretty good intelligent agent, as far as commercial agents went But like most commercial agents, it wasn't terribly bright and it was programmed to research from certain commercial databases, mostly owned by Quaker Oats. How Quaker Oats became the largest mainstream information and technology service in the world was one of those stories that could fill the dry nonfiction books of at least three sabbatical-taking Wall Street Journal writers. All Creek knew is that he enjoyed seeing a guy in breeches become the universal symbol of high technology. Still, he didn't want his own intelligent agent wearing 18th-century clothing. Creek had as well-developed a sense of irony as the next guy, but breeches were simply distracting.

From the storage cube, Creek pulled out the source code for an intelligent agent he'd been developing at the time of his last vacation from the computing world, and began mixing and matching it with Todd. Todd's database connection and information retrieval and optimization subroutines stayed; its native AI and database preferences were tossed, as were its request caching; if the UNE government wasn't supposed to know what he was looking for, there no reason why AOL or Quaker Oats should. His Frankenstein monster of an agent now collected, Creek fired up a zipper utility to mesh the parts together. His new agent had everything it needed except for one element. But to incorporate that element, he needed a little more headroom than his new computer was going to give him.

Creek flipped out his communicator and made a call.

"NOAA," the voice on the other end said. It was Bill Davison, an old friend of Creek's.

"Yeah, I want to know if it's going to rain tomorrow," Creek said.

"You know, the sad thing is how many calls we get which actually ask that" Bill said. "Like it's easer to call us than to watch the news."

"Everyone knows you can't trust weathermen," Creek said.

"Christ, I don't trust them, and I am one," Bill said. "How are you, Harry?"

"Same old, same old, Bill," Creek said. "Listen, I was wondering if I could trouble for you a favor."

"I'm broke," said Bill. "I work for the government you know."

"Funny," Creek said. "You have the same pay scale I have. That's not too bad."

"Said the guy who isn't paying alimony and child support," Bill said. "But enough about my pathetic life. What do you need, Harry?"

"I understand that you folks over there at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have some nifty computers," Creek said.

"We sure do," Bill allowed. "We model the weather so you don't have to. Speaking in the aggregate, we have more computing power than every single human brain in Massachusetts, although since that's where my ex is from, you'll have to take that estimation with a grain of salt."

"Are you using all of it at the moment? I kind of have a project I need a little extra computing power for."

"How much you need?" Bill asked.

"How much you got?" Creek asked.

"Oh," Bill said. "One of those projects. You know, the last time I let you borrow time, I sort of got a talking-to. My boss at the time was going to write me up, until I mentioned to him that while your work was not technically germane to weather tracking and prediction, neither was his lesbian pornography simulator. We agreed to let it drop after that."

"Well, I don't want to get you in trouble," Creek said.

"Don't worry about it," Bill said. "He left anyway. He's now VP of technology for Smith College. Remind me in about twelve years to make sure my daughter doesn't go there."

"It's a deal," Creek said.

"Nifty," Bill said. "Now let's see. Hurricane season has begun, which means we've got a pretty heavy load at the moment, so I can't carve off any time for you on any of the big guns. But here's something that might do. We've got an IBM box that's sitting idle; it's scheduled to be replaced. It's a couple of generations back, so it's not top of the line, but on the other hand It'll be all yours. And this way no one will complain when your little project suddenly grabs all the processing cycles. Hell, no one will even know it's there, and that's good for me."

"That sounds perfect, Bill," Creek said, "I owe you one."

"No you don't," Bill said. "I'd be dead if it wasn't for you. Short of asking for cash or sex, there's not much you could ask for I'd say no to."

"That was a long time ago now," Creek said. "I think we're getting close to karmic balance."

"Says you," Bill said. "We all should have bought it at Pajmhi. Every day I'm alive is a day extra. Although I should note that in this calculation, since my life was extended long enough to get married, you're indirectly responsible for my divorce."

"Sorry about that," Creek said.

"Forget it," Bill said. "It could be worse. I got a great kid out of it"

"Who should not go to Smith," Creek said.

"Thanks for the reminder. Here's the address for the IBM." Bill rattled it off. "Give me a minute to set up a user account for you under 'creek.' Password the same. Change both once you get in and lock the door behind you, if you know what I mean. The IBM is still connected to the network and the last thing I need is for some teenager to get in and start fucking with our weather reports. Something like that is not easily remedied by blackmailing the boss."

"Got it," Creek said. "Thanks again, Bill."

"De nada," Bill said. "Gotta go. These hurricanes don't model themselves." He clicked off.

Creek stared at his communicator for a moment, and for about the one millionth time in his life pondered over the Battle of Pajmhi, who lived, who died, and how it all played out over the rest of his life. At this specific moment, it worked to his favor. This brought the tally to one good thing for every thousand bad things. Be that as it may, it was one good thing he could use.

Creek signed into the IBM machine and fired up a system diagnostic; he was delighted to find it sufficiently roomy in both memory and processing for what he needed. Creek went to his closet and pulled out another memory cube, activated it, and sent its exceptionally compressed contents to the IBM. This took the better part of 20 minutes; Creek fixed himself a snack. When the cube's contents had transferred, Creek sent over a program to decompress and then assemble the data. The data were actually several separate files; the core was a data file that, once assembled, would be comparatively small. Most of the massive amounts of data were files that would comprise the modeling environment for the core data.