“Aha! another victim, I bet.”

“My boss thinks they might’ve been double-billing us,” Maxine improvises, “we did stop the last check, but somebody thought we should introduce a personal note. I happened to be in screaming distance.”

The girl’s gaze keeps flicking to the screen of her little computer. “Too bad, everybody’s split, only scavengers now. You ever see that movie Zorba the Greek (1964)? the minute this old lady dies, the villagers all go rushing in to grab her stuff? Well, this here’s Zorba the Geek.”

“No easy-open wall safes here, or . . .”

“All emptied out, the minute the pink slips showed up. How about your company? Did they at least get your Web site up and running for you OK?”

“Without meaning to offend . . .”

“Oh, tell me, tag soup, right, lame-ass banners all over the place random as the stall walls in a high-school toilet? All jammed together? finding anything, after a while it hurts your eyes? Pop-ups! Don’t get me started, ‘window.open,’ most pernicious piece of Javascript ever written, pop-ups are the li’l goombas of Web design, need to be stomped back down to where they came from, boring duty but somebody’s got to.”

“Strange idea of ‘awesome and hip web graphics’ anyway.”

“Kind of puzzling. I mean I did what I could, but somehow it felt like that their heart just wasn’t in it?”

“That maybe Web design wasn’t really their main business?”

The girl nods, consciously, as if somebody might be monitoring.

“Listen, when you’re done here—I’m Maxi by the way—”

“Driscoll, hi—”

“Let me buy you a cup of coffee or something.”

“Better yet there’s a bar right down the street’s still got Zima on tap.”

Maxine gives her a look.

“Where’s your nostalgia, man, Zima’s the bitch drink of the nineties, come on, I’m buyin the first round.”

Fabian’s Bit Bucket dates from the early days of the dotcom boom. The girl behind the bar waves at Driscoll when she and Maxine come in and reaches for the Zima tap. They are soon settled into a booth behind a couple oversize schooners of the once wildly popular novelty beverage. At the moment nothing much is happening, though happy hour looms, and with it the onset of another impromptu pink-slip party, for which the Bucket has begun to get a reputation.

Driscoll Padgett is a freelance Web-page designer, “making it up as I go along, just like everybody else,” also temping as a code writer, for $30 an hour—she’s fast and conscientious, and the word has got around, so she’s more or less steadily in demand, though now and then there’s a gap in the rent cycle where she’s had to resort to the Winnie list, or index cards stuck up next to dumpsters, and so forth. Loft parties sometimes, though that’s usually for the cheap drinks.

Driscoll was over at hwgaahwgh.com today looking for Photoshop filter plug-ins, having like many of her generation acquired a Jones which has led them off on scavenger hunts after ever-more-exotic varieties. “Should be custom-designin plug-ins of my own, been tryin to teach myself Filter Factory language, not that hard, almost like C, but looting’s easier, today I actually downloaded something off of the people who Photoshopped Dr. Zizmor.”

“What, the babyface dermatologist in the subway?”

“Otherworldly, right? First-rate work, the clarity, the glow?”

“And . . . the legal situation here . . .”

“Is if you can get in, snatch and grab it. Never had that happen?”

“All the time.”

“Where do you work?”

OK, Maxine figures, let’s see what happens. “Hashslingrz.”

“Oboy.” Such a look. “Done a few quick in and outs over there too. Don’t think I could ever handle it full-time. Sooner lick the remains of a banana cream pie off of Bill Gates’s face, they make fuckin Microsoft look like Greenpeace. Guess I never saw you around.”

“Oh, I’m only temping there myself. Go in once a week and do the accounts receivable.”

“If you’re a devoted fan of Gabriel Ice, just ignore me, but— even in a business where arrogant pricks are the norm? anybody inside a mile radius of ol’ Gabe ought to be wearin a hazmat suit.”

“I think I got to see him once. Maybe. At a distance? All kinds of entourage in my sight line sort of thing?”

“Not doin too bad, for somebody just got in under the wire.”

“How’s that.”

“Street cred. Anybody who got in before ’97 is considered OK—from ’97 to 2000 it can go either way, maybe they’re not always cool, but usually they’re not quite the kind of full-service dickhead you’re seeing in the business now.”

“He’s considered cool?”

“No, he’s a dickhead, but one of the early ones. A pioneer dickhead. Ever get to any of those legendary hashslingrz parties?

“Nope. You?”

“Once or twice. That time they had all the naked chicks out in the freight elevator covered with Krispy Kreme donuts? and the one where Britney Spears showed up disguised as Jay-Z? Only it turned out to be a Britney Spears look-alike?”

“Gee, the stuff I keep missing out on. Knew I shouldn’t’ve had all those kids . . .”

“Those days’s all history now anyway,” Driscoll shrugs. “Echoes in the past. Even if hashslingrz is hirin like it’s 1999.”

Hmm . . . “Thought I noticed a lot of new payroll around. What’s going on?”

“Same old satanic pact, only more of it. They’ve always liked to trawl for amateur hackers—now they’ve set up this, well it’s more than just a firewall with a dummy computer, it’s a virtual corporation, totally bogus, sittin out there as bait for the script kiddies, who they can then keep a eye on, wait till they’re just about to crack all the way into core, then bust them and threaten legal action. Offer them a choice between pullin a single over on Rikers or an opportunity to take the next step toward becoming a ‘real hacker.’ Is how they put it.”

“You know somebody this happened to?”

“A few. Some took the deal, some split town. They enroll you in a course out in Queens where you learn Arabic and how to write Arabic Leet.”

“That’s . . .” taking a guess, “using a qwerty keyboard to make characters that look like Arabic? So hashslingrz is, what, expanding into a new Mideast market area?”

“One theory. Except that every day civilians walk around, no clue, even when it’s filling up screens right next to them at Starbucks, cyberspace warfare without mercy, 24/7, hacker on hacker, DOS attacks, Trojan horses, viruses, worms . . .”

“Didn’t I see something in the paper about Russia?”

“They’re serious enough about cyberwar, training people, spending budget, but even Russia you don’t have to worry about so much as”—pretending to smoke air hookah—”our Muslim brothers. They’re the true global force, all the money they need, all the time. Time is what the Stones call on their side, yes it is. Trouble ahead. Word around the cubes is there’s ’ese huge U.S. government contracts, everybody’s after em, big deal comin up in the Middle East, some people in the community sayin Gulf War Two. Figures Bush would want to do his daddy one better.”

Toggling Maxine immediately into Anxious Mom mode, thinking about her boys, who might be too young to draft at the moment, but ten years from now, given the way U.S. wars tend to drag out, will be fish in a barrel, more than likely the kind of barrel that holds 42 gallons and is going currently for about 20, 25 bucks . . .

“You OK, Maxi?”

“Thinking. Sounds like Ice wants to be the next Evil Empire.”

“Sad thing is, is ’ere’s enough code monkeys around who’ll just go jumpin in blind, fodder for the machine.”

“They’re not any smarter than that? What happened to revenge of the nerds?”

Driscoll snorts. “Is no revenge of the nerds, you know what, last year when everything collapsed, all it meant was the nerds lost out once again and the jocks won. Same as always.”

“What about all these nerd billionaires in the trades?”