Lost Boys by Orson Scott Card Read Free Book Online

to death."
    "Hey, thanks," said Step.
    "No, really I loved the game, I just wished you had kept the bad guys moving in a kind of semi-random way, so the player wouldn't catch on that they were homing in. So you couldn't quite be sure where they were going to go. Then the game would have stayed fun into much higher levels, and you would never have had to include that killer speed level where you can't outrun the bad guys."
    "There is no killer speed level," said Step.
    "Really?"
    "Not if you find all the back doors out of the different rooms."
    It was the kid's turn to look embarrassed. "Back doors?"
    "Hacker Snack isn't an arcade game, it's a puzzle game," said Step. "Don't tell me you were trying to outrun those little suckers at every level."
    "I got up to half a million points doing it that way" said the kid.
    "That is the most incredible thing I ever heard. You should've been creamed before you got twenty thousand points. You must have the reflexes of a bat."
    The kid grinned. "I'm the best damn video wizard you'll ever meet," he said. "You got to show me those back doors."
    "And you got to show me what you mean about randomizing."
    "Come on inside, I've got your game up on one of my machines, just in case you came by."
    "You got an Atari here?"
    "Hey, there's not a soul here who doesn't know the Atari is ten times the computer the 64 is. The only reason we're all writing 64 software is that millions of them are getting bought and the Atari is still going for like a thousand dollars which means nobody buys it."
    Step followed him into the building. "How come you came outside to smoke?" he asked. "I notice people smoking in most of the offices."
    "Not in mine," said the kid. "I don't let anybody smoke around the machines. Fouls them up. Like pouring cokes on them."
    The kid didn't let anybody smoke around any of the machines?
    "What's your name?" Step asked.
    "My parents call me Bubba, I was baptized Roland McIntyre, but I kind of think of myself as Saladin Gallowglass." He glanced back over his shoulder at Step and grinned. "You ever play D&D?"
    "My brother tried to teach me Dungeons and Dragons one time, but after five hours the game itself hadn't actually started."
    "Then he's a piss-poor dungeonmaster, if you ask me, no offense of course since he's your brother. A good dungeonmaster can get you into the game in half an hour and make it move along like you were watching a movie. Almost. Here's your office, by the way."
    It was an empty room. They had known he was coming, and there wasn't even a desk inside.
    "They had a desk in here but I made them move it out," said Bubba Roland Saladin Gallowglass. "I told them you weren't here to write prissy little maiden-aunt letters to your nieces and nephews, you were here to write manuals and for that you needed a full computer setup, complete with a word processor and at least one of every computer we do software for. So they're coming in this afternoon to put up a computer counter like the one I've got here. This is my office. You'll be sharing with me till yours is ready, if you don't mind."
    Step walked into hacker heaven. Two desk- height counters ran along both the long walls of the room, with a couple of shelves above them. The lower shelf held monitors for a half-dozen computers, and the upper shelf held books and papers and stacks of disks. And the counter itself was crowded with 64s, a couple of VICs, a TI, a Radio Shack Color Computer, even one of those crummy little Timex computers. Also an old monochrome Pet, which was apparently used as a word processor. And an Atari, with Hacker Snack up and running in demonstration mode. Except that the demonstration mode was supposed to have the game at level one, and this one was running at level twenty.
    "You broke into the code," said Step.
    "I like to use the game as a screen saver, because everything shifts on it. But level twenty has the prettiest colors."
    "That was copy-protected six ways from Tuesday."
    "Yeah, well, it