"You talked the Greek
into it?" he hissed. "How?"
"I kissed his ass without insulting his intelligence."
"Neat trick," Kurt said, and they had a little partner-to-partner
high-five. "I'd better login to that thing and get it onto the network,
huh?"
"Yeah," Anders said. "I'm gonna order some lunch, lemme get you
something."
#
What they had done, was they had hacked the shit out of those boxes that
Kurt had built in his junkyard of a storefront of an apartment.
"These work?" Alan said. He had three of them in a big catering tub from
his basement that he'd sluiced clean. The base stations no longer looked
like they'd been built out of garbage. They'd switched to low-power
Mini-ATX motherboards that let them shrink the hardware down to small
enough to fit in a 50-dollar all-weather junction box from Canadian
Tire.
Adam vaguely recognized the day's street-kids as regulars who'd been
hanging around the shop for some time, and they gave him the hairy
eyeball when he had the audacity to question Kurt. These kids of Kurt's
weren't much like the kids he'd had working for him over the years. They
might be bright, but they were a lot...angrier. Some of the girls were
cutters, with knife scars on their forearms. Some of the boys looked
like they'd been beaten up a few times too many on the streets, like
they were spoiling for a fight.
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