“Let me see,” I said, and he grumpily opened his laptop.
The screen was covered with the inside of my head: images, words, photos, maps, mathematical equations.
The hacker scowled, seeming more perplexed than mad, though. “It’s weird,” he said. “You guys don’t have a computer with you?”
“No,” Fang said. “Not even a cell phone.”
“What about a Palm Pilot?” the hacker asked.
“Nope,” I said. “We’re kinda more low-tech than that.” Like, having Kleenex would be a huge step up for us.
“A memory chip?” he persisted.
I froze. Almost against my will, I slid my gaze over to Fang.
“What kind of memory chip?” I asked, striving for casual.
“Anything,” the hacker said. “Anything that would have data on it that would interfere with my hard drive.”
“If we did have a chip,” I said carefully, “could you access it?”
“If I knew what it was,” he said. “Maybe. What do you have?”
“It’s small and square,” I said, not looking at him.
“Like this?” The hacker held his fingers about three inches apart.
“Smaller.”
His fingers were a half-inch apart. “You have a memory chip this small?”
I nodded.
“Let me see. Where is it?”
I took a deep breath. “In me. It’s implanted in me. I saw it on an X-ray.”
He stared at me with horror in his eyes. He turned off his laptop and closed the lid. “You have a memory chip that small implanted in you,” he verified.
I nodded, guessing this was somewhat worse than having cooties.
He took several steps back. “A chip like that is bad news,” he said slowly, as if I were stupid. “It might be NSA. I won’t mess with it. Look, you stay away from me! Next thing, they’ll be after me.” He backed away into the darkness, his hands up as if to ward off evil. “I hate them! Hate them!” Then he was gone, back into the bowels of the tunnels.
“See ya,” I whispered. “Wouldn’t want to be ya.”
Fang looked at me irritably. “I can’t take you anywhere.”
I so wished he weren’t all banged up—so I could whack him.
120
We tried to get some sleep—God knows we needed it. I kind of dozed off. Then I wasn’t asleep, I knew that much. But I wasn’t awake, exactly.
I’d been, like, sucked into another dimension, where I could feel my body, sort of, knew where I was, and
yet was powerless to move or speak. I was in a movie, starring me, watching it all happen around me. I was going down a dark tunnel, or the tunnel was slipping by me, and I was staying still. Trains were rushing past me on both sides, so it was a subway tunnel.
I was thinking, Okay, subway tunnel. Yeah, so?