(6 of 10)
``Your equipment requires maintenance,'' Raster says. ``Please contact the cable company.''
``Your equipment is fine,'' Codex says. ``I'm encrypting your back channel. To the cable company, it looks like noise. As you fig ured out, that number is your personal encryption key. No government or corporation on earth can eavesdrop on us now.''
``Gosh, thanks,'' I say.
``You're welcome,'' Codex replies. ``Now, let's get down to biz. We have something you want. You have something we want.''
``How did you know the answer to the Soldier Field jelly-bean question?''
``We've got all 27,'' Codex says. And he rattles off the secret numbers for Candlestick Park, the Kingdome, the Meadowlands . . .
``Unless you've broken into the accounting firm's vault,'' I say, ``there's only one way you could have those numbers. You've been eavesdropping on my little chats with Raster. You've tapped the line coming out of this set-top box, haven't you?''
``Oh, that's typical. I suppose you think we're a bunch of socially inept, acne-ridden, high-IQ teenage hackers who play sophomoric pranks on the Establishment.'' ``The thought had crossed my mind,'' I say. But the fact that the cartoon sloth can give me such a realistic withering look, as he is doing now, suggests a much higher level of technical sophistication. Raster only has six facial expressions and none of them is very good. ``Your brother runs an ad agency, no?''
``Correct.''
``He recently signed up Simoleons Corp.?''
``Correct.''
``As soon as he did, the government put your house under full-time surveillance.''
Suddenly the glass eyeball in the front of the set-top box is looking very big and beady to me. ``They tapped our infotainment cable?''
``Didn't have to. The cable people are happy to do all the dirty work -- after all, they're beholden to the government for their monopoly. So all those calculations you did using Raster were piped straight to the cable company and from there to the government. We've got a mole in the government who cc'd us everything through an anonymous remailer in Jyvaskyla, Finland.''
``Why should the government care?''
``They care big-time,'' Codex says. ``They're going to destroy Simoleons. And they're going to step all over your family in the process.''
``Why?''
``Because if they don't destroy E-money,'' Codex says, ``E-money will destroy them.''
The next afternoon I show up at my brother's office, in a groovily refurbished ex-power plant on the near West Side. He finishes rolling some calls and then waves me into his office, a cavernous space with a giant steam turbine as a conversation piece. I think it's supposed to be an irony thing.
``Aren't you supposed to be cruising the I-way for stalled motorists?'' he says.
``Spare me the fraternal heckling,'' I say. ``We crypto-anarchists don't have time for such things.''
``Crypto-anarchists?''
``The word panarchist is also frequently used.''
``Cute,'' he says, rolling the word around in his head. He's already working up a mental ad campaign for it.
``You're looking flushed and satisfied this afternoon,'' I say.