The Last Goodbye by Reed Arvin Page B

kind that just tries everything. But there’s a downside.”
    â€œWhich is?”
    â€œIt would take about six hundred years to run.”
    â€œHow about all that stuff in the movies, where the guy just pushes a few buttons and it’s, bam, we’re in?”
    Nightmare’s face showed pure derision. “Pure Hollywood. You work for weeks to break something like this down. To get into this we have to aim better, not waste our efforts. I’m running the latest version of Crack right now, but it’s probably futile.” Nightmare didn’t give me a chance to ask. “Automated dictionary attack. It’s got every word in the English language in it, so it just hammers away with word combinations. But this encryption is over the top, even with my computer at home working simultaneously.”
    â€œYou can do that?”
    â€œYeah, you can spread Crack across multiple platforms, and you get an exponential increase in power. Maybe if I could get the mainframe at Tech working on it, we’d have a shot.”
    â€œCan we?”
    â€œUmm, maybe.”
    â€œLook, Michael, is this going to work?”
    Nightmare shrugged. “You’re makin’ too much noise, man. Lemme think.”
    Four hours later, it was almost nine-thirty. Nightmare said he was hungry. I said I would call a pizza delivery company. He said, and I’m quoting him now, “Fuck this shit, I’m going home.”
    â€œYou’re giving up?”
    Nightmare stood and began pacing back and forth in front of Townsend’s computer. It seemed best not to disturb him, so I just let him do it. “Look,” he said after a couple of minutes, “I need to think this out. I’ll meet you here in the morning.”
    â€œTo do what?”
    Nightmare looked at me. “Killah was good,” he said. “But he ain’t Nightmare.”

CHAPTER EIGHT
    IF YOU WANT TO ROMANTICIZE ATLANTA— and most of us who live here do—see it at sunset. In the dim half-light of dusk—those precious few minutes—it teeters among its various personalities, sublime and untouchable. It is a city built in a forest, its hard edges softened by the tips of hickories, sweetgums, white oaks, and red maples. There is a fragility to the loveliness of it, particularly for those of us who spend our days and nights with the undergrowth that lurks beneath its surface. But as night grows, its sense of history becomes murkier; the tone becomes more urban, less distinctively southern. It is a city caught between sunlight and dark, between history and tomorrow.
    The city’s past is held captive by the sweet fragrance of magnolia blossoms, which despite the crush of automobiles and skyscrapers, continues somehow to survive. This is a world in which the Confederate flag can be seriously considered a romantic symbol. It is badly fraying along its edges, but its resilience has shut the mouths of a lot of cultural observers, few of them southern. In that world, there are still cotillions for young white girls, as long as they have parents who are sufficiently wealthy and nostalgic. They cling to those conventions because they feel what’s coming: Nightmare’s new economy. That version of Atlanta is the center of the high-tech South, an essential node in a faceless, soulless world without borders or history. That world will come soon enough. When it does, combining words like “southern” and “gracious” will be as anachronistic as the Sons of the Confederacy. But in between, tenuous and trying desperately not to fall apart, is Atlanta’s present, its daylight: urban life in the South of these United States. I have seen its diversity better than most. I grew up in the rural South, so I know the world people come to Atlanta to get away from, which is an important part of their psyche. I went to Emory, so I know what southern children are like who grow up so sheltered and privileged that