Anyway, time passed and both Tanisha and Ken began to enjoy their stay at Mt. Wellion. Just south of Mt. Wellion was a city called Sunville. When Ken had a chance he stayed with Tanisha in their apartment in Sunville. Sunville was one of the older type of cities. Most houses were built around 1997, and the city center was an area of poverty and decay. As the city expanded its limits outwards, it left the decaying city center behind.

If you had a low income you'd live near the center of the city. If you had a high income you lived in the outer regions. If you didn't have a income at all, you lived right in the center.

Midtown.

Although most high-income citizens could easily get to one side of the city to the other using the surface trains, some, who didn't fear the high crime rate of the Midtown area. Midtown was the place to be if you suddenly felt like having your face kicked in by a total stranger looking for money..or drugs. In short; you wouldn't go down there at night just for the fun of it.

In Midtown one could get almost all kinds of drugs, natural and artificial. If you didn't find something to fit you taste you could easily have it custom made in a couple of hours.

The people who lived here kept much to them selves. Living in small dirty, damp flats converted from old office buildings. The ground floors of most buildings had been converted to small shops. What they sold was highly affected by in which part of Midtown they were. The Chinese sector, who had the majority of Midtown's inhabitants, had everything from synthetic- pet shops to sushi bars. The path between the buildings at street level was so narrow that it was impossible to drive a car there. The buildings in this sector were post nineteen-ninetees, fifty stories american style office complexes with occational chinese dragon models and neon signs.

Ken and Tanisha had to cross the European sector on their way to their appartment. The European sector contained most of the people who for some reason did not make it through the Outland Program. The European had all the money. They were the only ones economically strong enough to afford to be frozen down and shipped out in large numbers and dropped on some completely unknown planet acting as pioneers. This, much smaller sector, was almost being sucked up by the much larger Chinese, but the civil guards and the vigilantes kept their stands.

Mostly populated by German, Swizz and British people, this was a clean and well-kept part of Midtown compared to the other sectors.

As Ken looked out of the cab window he could see the city gradualy changing from Midtown to Sunville. The signs got bigger, the road got less bumpier and the houses got bigger and more fashionable.

The cab pulled up in front of the housing complex and Ken pulled his id card through the card reader on the wall. The door opened and he stood face to face with Roger.

- Roger..Good golly! How the hell did you get in ? Ken said.

- Is that all you have to say to an old friend ? I haven't seen you guys in over a year.

Roger looked much older. Even though it had been only a year since he last saw him he looked like he had aged ten.

- Well, it is a bit of a surprise!

- Could we go up to your flat ? With locks as easy to pick as these ones, I don't feel quite safe down here.

- Sure. How are you doing ? You look a bit worried. Is something wrong?

The elevator stopped at twenty two and Ken got the appartment door open.

- I think you better sit down, Roger. You look like you could use a drink Tanisha said and pulled out a chair.

- Ken. I'm in trouble he said quickly.

- No shit! You've been hacking on most systems known to mankind, so what do you expect ?

- I'm not kidding this time Ken. I'm in real trouble!

Tanisha poured him a drink and sat down beside Ken in the sofa. Roger started talking.

- You know that EISDN Worm program you coded for me just before you left.. Well, it worked fine. I got a lot of accounts and everything was great. But then one day, while I was getting some new accounts for a couple of guys I know the program had disappeared from my disk!

- But I though you said it was impossible to access external terminals from the EISDN net ? Maybe you deleted it by a mistake..

- No. I checked that. I have a a Trashcan program running at all times so that I can easliy get back whatever I delete. It was not in the Trashcan, and the logfile showed that the terminal had been idle for the whole period. Even though I know I used it! Then the strangest thing happened. The next day it was back on my disk. But the program had grown. It was about twice the original size. I ran a couple of scanners on it and came up with nothing. Then I erased it. I didn't think any more about it, until about two months ago. It was sunday or saturday when people from the Department of Defence's Computer Emergency Response Team smashed my door in and flew me down to Carnegie Mellon.

- What?!' Ken didn't believe his own ears. You were arrested by the Computer Emergency Response Team ? Wow. I though they only handled the real biggies. You know, when national security was at stake.

- Well, I was arrested, but they never told me why. They just interrogated me for a couple of days, asking me about which company I work for and so on... When I got back home all my stuff was gone and my appartment was turned upside-down. I've been living at a friends place since then. A couple of days ago I fixed a ticket on the MagnaTrain and headed for Sunville.

Ken leaned back in the sofa and ran his fingers through his hair.

- Wow. Roger - you're in some deep deep shit.

- I know. Luckily they didn't find my portable terminal and I always keep the most important disks hidden in the back yard.

- Do you have a copy of the Worm you got from me ? And the one you erased from your disks?

- Sure. I was hoping you could take a look at it.

And so he did. After hooking up to the Analoge Mainframe over at Mt. Vellion where Ken naturally had an account since he was a student there, Ken started disassembling the Worm. The program was enormous. Roger had told Ken that it had grown to about twice the size of the original, but the program had a build-in compression module, and as soon as it was run it started growing.

After a couple of Tanisha's strong coffee mugs later, Ken had the complete program uncompressed. It took up almost one hundred and seventytwo clusters. Ken froze it and ran it through a couple of the SSA Analyzer Modules. When programming on a Analog Mainframe you couldn't just read the memory dump like on the old digital ones. All you could do was to watch things happen, freeze the program and then try to analyze them.

In the early hours of the morning, Ken had retracted a couple of modules from the Worm program and copied them to a disk.

- That's about all I can do with this equipment. Now let's take a cab down to Midtown and have some people take a peek at these modules.

- Maybe I should stay here and watch...

- No no, you're coming Roger. Tanisha can stay and watch the appartment. You know where my gun is, Tanisha - Just in case.

Outside it was dark and cold. The cab pulled up beside the entrance and they got in.

- Where to guys ?

- The Chinese Sector, Midtown.

- Hey! I can drop you off at the entrance. But that's as far as I go at this hour. I have two kids ya know!

Ken closed the cab door behind him and they started walking towards the entrance to the Chinese Sector.