GEN13 - Version 2.0 by Unknown Author

able to reach it anymore.
    This was no ordinary after-school program, he thought. Is it still active?
    Are they still watching?
    The best way to find answers, he figured, was to remove the cover of the vent and see what was inside. Without releasing his left hand’s grip on the cable, Lynch used his right to close the blade of his pocket knife. That was easy enough. The next step was trickier, as he tried to open the knife’s screwdriver blade with one hand. It slipped off his fingernail to snap shut twice. The third attempt seemed to be working better, though. The screwdriver had just barely managed to clear the body of the knife, when Lynch was startled by a voice.
    A voice coming from inside the vent.
    “Well, well. John Lynch,” the electronically-disguised voice said with a sigh. “You know, I left this here in case anyone came snooping. But I never imagined it would be you.”
    It’s a camera, all right, Lynch thought. And a speaker.
    “Although I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. You never could keep your nose out of other people’s business.”
    It’s someone I know. Who—?
    Lynch never got to finish the thought. Because that was the exact moment when a high-voltage charge surged through the vent. Every muscle of Lynch’s body constricted in pain as the shock sent him flying.
    Lynch landed hard on the floor.
    He wasn’t moving.
    “Now, I suppose I’ll have to deal with your brats, too, before they come looking for you,” the voice continued.
    There was another sigh.
    “Life is just so complicated sometimes.”
    CHAPTER 7
    “Y ou’re hired,” said the man in the suit.
    I “But... don’t you want to see my resume?”
    “Oh, sure. You’re hired.”
    Kat got up from her chair and picked up her bag.
    “So, when would you like to start?” the man said. His voice had the vague, detached quality of someone speaking from far away in a daydream. “You could start now, if you want. We could get you set up now and you could get... y’know, started. When would be a good time for you to start?”
    Kat gave him an icy stare. “Oh, I don’t know,” she said, with an edge in her voice. “How about never? Is never good for you?”
    She spun on her heel and stormed out of the office, slamming the door behind her. She didn’t even slow down when she heard the glass in the door shatter.
    In fact, Kat didn’t slow down long enough to put on her coat until she was out of the building and nearly three blocks away.
    Kat stood on the street comer and growled under her breath. She was already well past the point where she’d had enough of this nonsense. Half of her interviews so far had gone exactly like this one. If it wasn’t computer whiz-kids barely older than herself who couldn’t get over being in a room with someone who was (as one of them put it) “even hotter than Lara Croft,” then it was balding, paunchy personnel directors mired in mid-life crises. Kat had neither the desire nor the intention to take a job where
    her chief qualification was as someone’s fantasy object.
    Yet, in the other half of her interviews, Kat kept facing the exact problem that Ms. Mickel had predicted back at the employment agency. The long and the short of it was that Kat had no relevant work experience. In fact, other than summers at the Kwikee Burger back home, she had no work experience at all. She hadn’t finished her degree, and hadn’t even made it halfway through the coursework for her major in computer science by the time I.O. whisked her away from school.
    Finally, and perhaps most ironically when you considered her age, a lot of the computer knowledge Kat had acquired at Princeton was already growing outdated. The technology was changing at light speed. The evolution was racing forward so quickly that, over the course of the time she’d spent with Gen 13 , new generations of hardware and programming languages were already beginning to appear. They were displacing the stuff Kat had learned to take over the