Read Online Rainbows End by Vinge Vernor - Free Book Online

impossible to unfold. Ma had not been pleased. “Hey, don’t worry, Juan.” The three left the edge of the flood channel and followed a narrow trail along the east edge of Pyramid Hill. This was far from any entrance, but the twins’ uncle worked for County Flood Control and they had access to CFC utilities support imagery — which just now they shared with Juan. The dirt beneath their feet became faintly translu-cent. Fifteen feet down, Juan could see graphics representing a ten-inch runoff tunnel. Here and there were pointers to local maintenance records. Jerry and Fred had used such omniscience before and not been caught. Today they were blending it with a map of the local network nodes. The overlay view was faint violet against the sunlit day, showing communication blind spots and active high-rate links.
The two stopped at the edge of a clearing. Fred looked at Jerry. “Tsk. Flood Control should be ashamed. There’s not a localizer node within thirty feet.”
    “Yeah, Jer. Almost anything could happen here.” Without a complete localizer mesh, nodes could not know precisely where they and their neighbors were. High-rate laser comm could not be established, and low-rate sensor output was smeared across the landscape. The outside world knew only mushy vagueness about this area.
    They walked into the clearing. They were deep in a network blind spot, but from here they had a naked-eye view up the hillside, to ground that must surely be within Pyramid Hill. If they continued that way, the Hill would start charging them.
    But the twins were not looking at the Hill. Jerry walked to a small tree and squinted up. “In fact, this is an interesting spot. They tried to patch the coverage with an airball.” He pointed into the branches and pinged. The utility view showed only a faint return, an error message. “It’s almost purely net guano at this point.”
Juan shrugged. “The gap will be fixed by tonight.” Around twilight, when aerobots flitted around the canyons, swapping out nodes here and there.
    “Well, why don’t we help the county by patching things right now?” Jerry held up a thumb-sized greenish object. He handed it to Juan.
Three antenna fins sprouted from the thing’s top. It was a typical ad hoc node. The dead ones were more trouble than bird poop. “You’ve perv’d this thing?” The node had Breaklns-R-Us written all over it, but perverting networks was harder in real life than in games. “Where did you get the access codes?”
    “Uncle Don gets careless.” Jerry pointed at the device. “All the permissions are loaded. Unfortunately, the bottleneck node is still alive.” He pointed upward, into the sapling’s branches. “You’re small enough to climb this, Juan. Just go up and knock down the node.”
    “Hmm.” “Hey, don’t worry. Homeland Security won’t notice.”
    In fact, the Department of Homeland Security would almost certainly notice, at least after the localizer mesh was patched. But just as certainly they wouldn’t care. DHS logic was deeply embedded in all hardware. “See All, Know All” was their motto, but what they knew and saw was for their own mission. They were notorious about not sharing with law enforcement. Juan stepped out of the blind spot and took a look at the Sheriff’s Department view. The area around Pyramid Hill had its share of arrests, mostly for enhancement drugs… but there had been nothing hereabouts for several weeks.
    “Okay.” Juan came back to the tree and scrambled up about ten feet, to where the branches spread out. The old node was hanging from rotted Velcro. He knocked it free and the twins caused it to have an accident with a rock. Juan shinnied down from the tree. They watched the diagnostics for a moment. Violet mists sharpened into bright spots as the nodes figured out where they and their perved sibling were, and coordinated up toward full function. Now point-to-point, laser routing was available; they could see the property labels