Exo: A Novel (Jumper) by Steven Gould Read Free Book Online

with a workshop and if the Michigan warehouse would be suitable.
    “Depends. At some point I’ll need a walk-in vacuum chamber—I’m betting we can get access to the eleven-foot chamber at Johnson Space Center. Or if I end up on the West Coast, Lockheed Martin has a great chamber in Sunnyvale. Here, we rigged a cylindrical chamber for our earlier tests, with a mating flange for the helmet collar, but the department repurposed it later for some vacuum-deposition tests.”
    He grinned, suddenly. “But while I was out I got a callback from one of my previous coauthors. He offered me a lecture post for the spring semester with immediate access to research facilities since I have—” He pointed at me. “—current funding.”
    “Oh. Great! Where?”
    “Stanford.”
    My stomach clenched and I nearly jumped away.
    Joe was at Stanford.
    Well, at least I wouldn’t need a new jump site.
    *   *   *
    My cell phone doesn’t .
    What I mean is, we completely killed its cellular radio when we rooted it. It can’t connect to any cell towers. This is deliberate.
    It will connect to WiFi hotspots, though, but every time it does, it uses a different Media Access Control address for the wireless Ethernet adaptor. My phone stores a block of four thousand MAC addresses harvested from obsolete and decommissioned equipment, and ranging from phones to computers to tablets to routers. Last time I checked, I’d used about half the list. The program is set to cycle through them again when it reaches the end, but I suspect I will break or lose the phone by then.
    I also did the regular security things, like using encrypted browsing and changing accounts regularly, but mostly I depended on looking like a different machine every time I connected to the net from wildly varying WiFi hotspots.
    When Joe first left for college, we used e-mail, instant messaging, voice over IP, and computer videoconferencing to talk during the week, and we saw each other on the weekends, usually with me taking him someplace.
    When I found him in bed, with her , I’d screamed and jumped away, ending up sobbing in the reading nook under my bed.
    I hadn’t done that in a while.
    An hour later, I connected to my e-mail account and found three e-mails.
    The short version is that one of Joe’s study partners had been dumped by her boyfriend. Beers and a shoulder to cry on had turned comforting into something more. It was the only time and he was so sorry and could I ever forgive him?
    I sent a one-word message, No , and deleted the e-mail, instant messaging, and telephony accounts that we’d used. If he sent any other e-mails, they bounced.
    Okay, when he sent them. I know he sent others. I read some of them off of his computer, while he was in class.
    Stalker much?
    Stalker.
    I watched Joe for the better part of a month, several times a day, usually through binoculars. I looked through his stuff when I knew he and his roommate had class. I even thought about putting a remote camera on his shelf, hidden in a book.
    Yeah, I know. Mega creepy.
    I didn’t put a camera in his bookshelf. I stopped visiting his room, though at first it was only because his roommate skipped class one day and nearly caught me.
    Then I just felt embarrassed.
    If some guy was entering my bedroom when I wasn’t there, how chill would I be with it? It took me another week to apply the same logic to my following him around campus.
    Either go to him and make up, or leave him alone.
    And I was too afraid to go to him.
    I stopped jumping to campus.
    Exactly two weeks later, Dr. Cory Matoska tells me he’s got a post at Stanford.
    Perfect.
    I connected to a coffeehouse WiFi hotspot in the Mission District of San Francisco and used an Internet telephony program to call Cory’s cell phone a few hours after his scheduled arrival on the Stanford campus.
    “How was your trip?”
    “Uh, Cent? The number shows up as blocked.”
    “Using Skype. Don’t have a dedicated number. You still have my