(7 of 10)
``Must have been those two imperial pints of Hog City Porter you had with your baby-back ribs at Divane's Lakeview Grill.''
Suddenly he sits up straight and gets an edgy look about him, as if a practical joke is in progress, and he's determined not to play the fool.
``So how'd you know what I had for lunch?''
``Same way I know you've been cheating on your taxes.''
``What!?''
``Last year you put a new tax-deductible sofa in your home office. But that sofa is a hide-a-bed model, which is a no-no.''
``Hackers,'' he says. ``Your buddies hacked into my records, didn't they?''
``You win the Stratolounger.''
``I thought they had safeguards on these things now.''
``The files are harder to break into. But every time information gets sent across the wires -- like, when Anne uses Raster to do the taxes -- it can be captured and decrypted. Because, my brother, you bought the default data- security agreement with your box, and the default agreement sucks.''
``So what are you getting at?''
``For that,'' I say, ``we'll have to go someplace that isn't under surveillance.''
``Surveillance!? What the . . . '' he begins. But then I nod at the TV in the corner of his office, with its beady glass eye staring out at us from the set-top box.
We end up walking along the lakeshore, which, in Chicago in January, is madness. But we hail from North Dakota, and we have all the cold-weather gear it takes to do this. I tell him about Raster and the cable company.
``Oh, Jesus!'' he says. ``You mean those numbers aren't secret?''
``Not even close. They've been put in the hands of 27 stooges hired by the the government. The stooges have already FedEx'd their entry forms with the correct numbers. So, as of now, all of your Simoleons -- $27 million worth -- are going straight into the hands of the stooges on Super Bowl Sunday. And they will turn out to be your worst public-relations nightmare. They will cash in their Simoleons for comic books and baseball cards and claim it's safer. They will intentionally go bankrupt and blame it on you. They will show up in twos and threes on tawdry talk shows to report mysterious disappearances of their Simoleons during Metaverse transactions. They will, in short, destroy the image -- and the business -- of your client. The result: victory for the government, which hates and fears private currencies. And bankruptcy for you, and for Mom and Dad.''
``How do you figure?''
``Your agency is responsible for screwing up this sweepstakes. Soon as the debacle hits, your stock plummets. Mom and Dad lose millions in paper profits they've never had a chance to enjoy. Then your big shareholders will sue your ass, my brother, and you will lose. You gambled the value of the company on the faulty data-security built into your set-top box, and you as a corporate officer are personally responsible for the losses.''