Archie had done Creek and his system the professional courtesy of assuming a low-level driller wouldn't cut it, and had begun probing his system with mid-level drillers, all of which reported back failure. Archie only had one high-level driller in his archive, but it was a doozy; it had famously drilled open the USDA system and ferreted out the crop forecasts for the year, leading to a collapse in the agricultural futures market. Archie hadn't written the driller, but he respected the hell out of the coding skills of the hack who had; the driller was elegantly designed. The USDA driller would be useless for any major corporate or government target, of course—on that level, a driller only works once—but it should have been more than enough for any home system on the planet. It wasn't.

If Archie had six weeks and nothing else to do, he might have been able to whip up a new driller of similar quality as the USDA one; as it was he had six minutes. So he elected to take another tack. He fired up a new window and logged into Basher's Dungeon, a hack forum, and posted a message as Creek taunting the hacks therein and proclaiming his system as hackproof. Such a taunt wouldn't dislodge serious hacks, but it would get some of the less skilled and more excitable hacks moving, and once their attacks starting bouncing off Creek's system, some of the more competent would sense the system as a legitimate challenge. To sweeten the deal Archie wrote that inside Creek's system was the long-rumored, never-seen video of a famous pop star going down on her not-famous-but-equally-hot identical twin sister.

That should work, Archie thought, and sent off the message. Then he reached into his archives and pulled out a monitor program and a retrieval program. The monitor program would observe the various attacks on Creek's system from the outside by tagging drillers and other programs as they reached Creek's system and then tracking their progress against it. When one of them cracked the system, the monitor program would alert the retrieval program, which would enter and grab information.

Archie was obviously no longer looking for Robin Baker's identity, but if Creek and the girl slipped away again, the information they found could help track them down. Archie directed the retrieval program to focus on personal information documents and all activity within the last couple of weeks. That was bound to be a lot of material but Archie could trim it down once he had it, and it was better than trying to download every file in the system.

Acuna stepped into the room. "Time to go," he said. "Wrap it up."

"Already wrapped," Archie said, and closed his computer. Let's see you handle this, Creek, he thought.

Brian noticed the hack drillers plinking at Creek's system the same way a musk ox notes a swarm of flies buzzing around its nose. He warded off earlier attacks from what he assumed was a single anonymous source, but he noticed that these new drillers were born substantially less sophisticated than the previous attacks and coming from multiple, non anonymous sources. So whoever was bothering him now was both stupid and clumsy. Brian left the diggers to their futile work and sent scouts of his own back down the pipe to the originators' systems (unsurprisingly easy to crack) and looked through their logs to find what they all had in common. What they had in common was a recent visit to Basher's Dungeon. Brian appropriated one of their identities, signed on, and found the post claiming to be from Creek.

That's sneaky, Brian thought. While he didn't approve of the attack on Creek's system (which was, in a manner of speaking, an attack on Brian himself), Brian could appreciate whomever it was trying to get other people to do his dirty work for him.

Brian's attention came back to the attacks on Creek's system; more complex diggers were arriving now, these from anonymous sources. The smarter kids had arrived, with their shiny toys. Brian wasn't concerned that they would drill the system, but if too many drillers arrived, defending the system would eventually and inevitably tax its resources, and Brian had other things to do today than play with the hacks.

Brian reached out and grabbed one of the simpler drillers, generating a trapping program on the fly to do so. He cracked it open and spilled the code; it was nothing special, but it featured what Brian was looking for—the hacksig of its maker, one OHN-SYAS69, more prosaically known as Peter Nguyen of Irvine, California. Brian learned with one sweep through Nguyen's system that Peter Nguyen was 15, had an extensive collection of busty porn, and was a budding if clearly not gifted hack; his driller was all off-the-shelf code, jammed together inelegantly into a barely functional program.

Peter Nguyen, I'm going to make you a star, Brian thought, and from the inelegant mess that was young master Nguyen's drilling program, crafted something new under the virtual sun: A metadriller, designed to latch onto other drilling programs, crack them open, find the hacksig of their makers, and then re-program the drillers to head home to their maker's system. After drilling the system open, they would broadcast the availability of its contents onto the world network for anyone to see and sample. A few hours later, the driller would initiate a system crash that included the driller program itself, leaving only Peter Nguyen's hacksig behind.

Drilling the drillers would be simple, for the simple reason that no one had ever done it before, so no one had thought to protect the drillers from being drilled. This is what Brian loved about hacks. They were smart, but they didn't like to think about things not directly in front of them.

Brian finalized the code (making sure the metadriller would self-wipe if drilled itself; wouldn't do to fall into the same trap as the hacks) and then fed it into an autonomous replicator program that would spit out a metadriller each time Creek's system registered an attack. Native system resources spent on dealing with the attacks would now be limited to pinging the replicator program after each attempt. As a bonus, the hack world would fall into chaos and ruin for a certain amount of time while the geeks tried to figure out what the hell was going on.

That was just fine with Brian. He might be a disembodied virtual consciousness, but at least he wasn't some fucking geek. Maybe deprived of their systems, some of these geeks might go out and get some sun or meet people or something. It couldn't hurt. In any event, the hacks might learn a little humility, which they were sorely lacking despite the fact they couldn't be relied upon to shower more than one day out of three.

As Brian contemplated the enforced socialization of the geek set, he noticed two programs—not drillers—hanging about his system's periphery. The first flitted from driller to driller, marking each with a tiny autonomous program; Brian recognized it as a monitor program. The other program hung there, unpacked. Brian reached out, grabbed it, cracked it open. It was a retrieval program, waiting for a driller to finish its work before entering Creek's system. Brian read the code and discovered who was trying to get inside of him.

"Well, hello there, Mr. Archie McClellan, whoever you are," Brian said. "I think it's time we got better acquainted."

Fixer opened a freezer in his basement and pulled out an economy-sized Popsicle box, like you'd buy in a warehouse store, and held it for Creek and Robin to examine. "Here it is," he said.

"Here is what?" said Robin.

"Your new identity," Fixer said.

"We're going to be Popsicles?" Robin said.

Fixer grinned. He set the box down on the table and slid out a plastic tray from its inside; on it was what looked to be extremely thin, arm length gloves. "I don't want you to think I'm glad you came to me," Fixer said. "Because, truly, I am not. However, your decision was either smart or lucky for you. From time to time the Malloy family has the need to get someone past the authorities quickly and get them offworld for a nice, long, relaxing vacation. And when they do, they come to me, because I have this"—he pointed to the gloves—"a new identity in a box."