The City Who Fought

Joat brought up a square piece of electronics from her harness and touched it. The bulge withdrew into the wall. Inside were readouts, a keypad, and a datajack. She squirmed until her backpack was on the floor between her knees, then pulled out a jackline from her Spuglish and clipped it into the socket.

The machine lit. Hello, Joat, scrolled across it. Simeon's gone bye-bye wurf!

"What is that?" Joseph said, fascinated.

"I usta think it was Simeon in a grudly strange comedown," Joat said, her fingers flying in a rapid taptaptaptiptiptip. "Only it isn't. 'S just a really neato AI program running on the station main computers. Fools ya, y'know? Real easy to get to thinking it's a real person, but it isn't. Smart piece of junk, but I can get around it. When it thinks you're Simeon, it really comes down as an animal."

Hello, Simeon, the screen printed. What's up, boss? Huh? Huh?

Joat's fingers scrambled. Nothing much, she keyed. Updating Shame on Me, she added.

Don't rightly know that one, pardner, the machine replied. Uhyip. The tip of Joat's tongue was clenched between her teeth in a rictus of concentration. At last, she leaned back and sighed, cracking her fingers two-handed.

"Now it thinks I'm Simeon again," she said.

" 'Shame on Me'?" Joseph enquired.

"Fool me once," Joat said, quoting, "shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me."

Joseph's laugh was quiet and appreciative. Joat felt the quiet glow of satisfaction you only got from another operator. Seld was neat, but he wasn't a… Well, he wasn't grown up, in the special way Joseph was grown up. She'd known a lot of people who were grown-up that way, but Joseph was the first one she had ever liked or trusted.

"So you manipulate the system through the central computer?" he said.

"Naw, not most of the time. Too con-spick-cue-us. Finkin' obvious, in fact. There's a distributed node system, fambly thousands of little compus, all got backup authority, if you can cut in. And nobody cuts in like jack-of-all-trades, my man."

Joseph clapped a hand on her shoulder. She stiffened and stared at it. He took it away, not snatching or lingering, either.

"How did you pick this up?" he said in admiration, pointing at her Spuglish.

"Dad." Fardling swiney. "Learned more from the bastard who won me from my uncle," she said. "He was smart, really smart, when he wasn't drunk or-well, when he was sober. Knew his way around any system there was. Never got caught, except once."

"Who by?" Joseph asked.

Joat turned her face toward him, and for a moment it was not a child's face at all. "Me," she said softly. "He forgot me. And I cracked his system. They think he's still alive. He went thataway out the lock, peeing blood. His ship's computer said everything was fine."

"Well," Joseph said with a cold smile, "if it's good enough for the official records, it's good enough for me. Now, show me how you decouple the local subsystems again."

"Like, it's got to be physical," Joat went on, animated again. "You-"