2
Plugged in all day to secretarial comstats turning nasty boardroom sharkfights into regurgitated memorandums suitable for shareholders, she was the bland paste that put a shine on corporate "accountability" clauses. Every night she got home and either popped a tricyclic and a red stripe lager, settling in for a long night of Disney-produced medi-dramas, or mixed vodka and an MDMA-derived german sports drink and went out with Bark. Bark was not Fed's favorite in the long line of boyfriends his mom had had, mostly because he insisted on trying to win points with his Mom by palling around with Fed. All Fed wanted was to be left alone to goggle in and wrench his brain around the tightest code he could find, teasing it apart byte by byte until that singing satisfaction of comprehension flooded his brain. One day Fed was going to change the world, and he'd figured out early that you didn't get to change the world by sitting on your ass.
But it was because of Bark that Fed started seeing Tony again. Bark'd come over for dinner, which was really just an old-fashioned form of foreplay, and had somewhere along the line decided that Fed should keep his tray with theirs on the jittery fomica platform that served as a kitchen table.
Fed had just unplugged when Bark's yelling had shook through the plyboard walls between his room and the kitchen. Fed ignored it and ran his finger around the mounting post on his right leg. He wiped off the excess antimicrobial grease on his jeans and held it up under the lamp to inspect his work, noting with a grimace the spreading crack in the plastic housing on the shin. Grunting to himself he slid it home and felt it catch. He leaned his head back against the water-stained wallpaper. His head hurt.
He'd been living on Hawaiian time for weeks, running the normal classes locally and power napping until the start of the courses on the islands. EST plus Hawaiian - which always ran late - was burning him bad, but he wanted the computer virus background something fierce and Haw