CyberNet

Larry stood her up. The bastard! Amanda was incandescent. She had been looking forward to the movie date for the last week. She had her naturally blonde hair cut and styled, had bought herself a horrendously expensive pair of shoes and a new dress, short enough to show off her shapely legs. A new bag concealed her favourite gun.

Amanda found Larry in the Terminal Bar and Grill, Finally! she thought, after trawling through several downtown bars. The leers of the dirty old men in those bars clung to her like sump-oil. The Terminal was not named after a bus station or airport lounge. The name harked back to the old, old days, when computers were the size of rooms and terminals with weird names, VT240, Wyse and Ansi, were 'hardwired' back to a 'server'. That was way back, before the CyberNet (version 0.1) had gone live in 2021, the year Amanda was born. Even the clientele in Terminal were old, styling themselves as 'hackers' in the traditional sense.

Larry was old. Nearly thirty. At least he was sober, for a change. Sat at the bar, wearing a week's worth of beard, a week's worth of sweat, Amanda could smell him from here, his brown hair in disarray, his black leather jacket slung over the back of his bar stool. Amanda knew there would be a switchblade in the right pocket, cash in the left and various electronic gizmos stashed in the others. He rarely carried a gun. Three chromed interface sockets studded his left temple, ready to be linked to the cellular cybermodem hidden in his jacket.

Amanda plonked herself in the next bar stool and surreptitiously pointed her gun at Larry. She wasn't too worried about setting off metal- or weapon-scanners in Terminal. The gun was a 3D-printed polymer model, which fired caseless high-density plastic ammo. Largely undetectable, it probably wouldn't penetrate Larry's jacket, but it would cause a helluva lot of pain if she shot him in the stomach, something she was very tempted to do.

"Where the hell have you been?" she asked, the gun never wavering from Larry's stomach.

Larry stuffed the last piece of peach pie into his mouth, chewed, swallowed and belched before replying. "Pleased to see you, too, Mandy," he replied, then, when he saw her finger tighten on the trigger, said, "I mean, Amanda, sweetie."

Amanda did not relax her trigger finger. She hated being called Mandy. "Where the hell have you been?" she repeated.

Larry looked over the young girl. Amanda was maybe eighteen, smart, determined and a genius with cyber-systems. Could he trust her with what he'd found? "I'm in a world of trouble," he said simply.