The Blue Nowhere

could’ve done something.
    Amused again, Phate looked down at the pistol in Gillette’s hand. “They let you have a gun?”
    “I borrowed it,” Gillette explained. “From a guy who stayed here to baby-sit me.”
    “And he’s, what, knocked out? Bound and gagged?”
    “Something like that.”
    Phate nodded. “And he didn’t see you do it so you’re going to tell them that it was me.”
    “Pretty much.”
    A bitter laugh. “I’d forgotten what a fucking good MUD tacticianyou were. You were the quiet one in Knights of Access, you were the poet. But, damn, you played a good game.”
    Gillette pulled a pair of handcuffs out of his pocket. These too he’d lifted off Backle’s belt after he body slammed the agent in the coffee room. He felt far less guilty about the assault than he supposed he ought to. He tossed the cuffs to Phate and stepped back. “Put them on.”
    The hacker took them but didn’t ratchet them around his wrists. He simply stared at Gillette for a long moment. Then: “Let me ask you a question—why’d you go over to the other side?”
    “The handcuffs,” Gillette muttered, gesturing toward them. “Put them on.”
    But with imploring eyes, Phate said passionately, “Come on, man. You’re a hacker. You were born to live in your Blue Nowhere. What’re you doing working for them?”
    “I’m working for them because I am a hacker,” Gillette snapped. “You’re not. You’re just a goddamn loser who happens to use machines to kill people. That’s not what hacking’s about.”
    “ Access is what hacking’s about. Getting as deep as you can into someone’s system.”
    “But you don’t stop with somebody’s C: drive, Jon. You have to keep going, to get inside their body too.” He waved angrily at the white-board, where the pictures of Lara Gibson and Willem Boethe were taped. “You’re killing people. They’re not characters, they’re not bytes. They’re human beings.”
    “So? I don’t see a bit of difference between software code and a human being. They’re both created, they serve a purpose, then people die and code’s replaced by a later version. Inside a machine or outside, inside a body or out, cells or electrons, there’s no difference.”
    “Of course there’s a difference, Jon.”
    “Is there?” he asked, apparently perplexed by Gillette’s comment. “Think about it. How did life start? Lightning striking the primordial soup of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphate and sulfate. Every living creature is made up of those elements, every living creature functions because of electrical impulses. Well, every one of thoseelements, in one form or another, you’ll find in a machine. Which functions because of electrical impulses.”
    “Save the bogus philosophy for the kids in the chat rooms, Jon. Machines’re wonderful toys; they’ve changed the world forever. But they’re not alive. They don’t reason.”
    “Since when is reasoning a prerequisite for life?” Phate laughed. “Half the people on earth are fools, Wyatt. Trained dogs and dolphins reason better than ninety percent of them.”
    “For Christ’s sake, what happened to you? Did you get so lost in the Machine World that you can’t tell the difference?”
    Phate’s eyes grew wide with anger. “Lost in the Machine World? I don’t have any other world! And whose fault is that?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Jon Patrick Holloway had a life in the Real World. He lived in Cambridge, he worked at Harvard, he had friends, he’d go out to dinner, he’d go on dates. His was as real as anybody else’s fucking life. And, you know what? He liked it! He was going to meet somebody, he was going to have a family!” The killer’s voice broke. “But what happened? You turned him in and destroyed him. And the only place left for him to go was the Machine World.”
    “No,” Gillette said evenly. “The real you was cracking into networks and stealing code and hardware and crashing nine-one-one. Jon Holloway’s life was totally fake.”
    “But it was something! It was the closest I ever came to having a life!” Phate swallowed and for a moment Gillette wondered if he was going to cry. But the killer controlled his emotions fast and, smiling, glanced around the dinosaur pen. He noticed the two broken keyboards sitting in the corner. “You’ve only busted two of them?” He laughed.
    Gillette himself couldn’t help but smile. “I’ve only been here a couple of days. Give me