Hacker slice-of-life: an introspective moment with someone who got a lot more than she expected from his old equipment.

'It's all about the hookups. A place to stay; a place to work; a place to eat; a place to browse... and time to get used to it all.'

That was her short list: that was what you needed when you stepped through the looking-glass.

'Not everything is topsy-turvy. Most places and things still make sense, it's the people and the ideas they exchange that are all screwed up. That's the nouns; the verbs, well... they all change when the pronouns do.

'So, who has the easier time of it, the loner or the social animal? Being a loner can only go so far: you still need people, even if you need to stay apart from them. The rogue wants to stay in sight of the herd after all; that makes each contact count for more.

'You don't need more than a few contacts to survive, though, and they can be replenished. I guess I like being a loner better.'

Not so long ago, this particular loner was a technician in his mid-forties, content if not satisfied at his job, and regarding Boston's "Peace of Mind" as his theme music.

That was before he got all the new hardware, not actually new but new to him, from among all the stuff in, on and next to the dumpsters behind the hi-tech buildings. Or, at least, so she presumed.

New technology had a thing, it seemed, about jettisoning good old computers. It was amazing what you could do with them: fix them up, put Linux on them, and give them to friends who didn't have computers yet, who didn't know how powerful they made you become. You could try out various distributions, too, with all those boxes.

There was always something new you could do with those older boxes, but maybe sometimes they might do something new to you... She never went dumpster-diving anymore, now, instead she looked for the roadside finds left out in front of upscale suburban houses on trash day.

Back when she was a he, it started with a cluster of three beige boxes he noticed, sitting beside an overflowing dumpster. There were nearly a dozen more inside it, all smeared with used coffee grounds and last year's annual reports for a company he had never heard of. They were a gold mine of usable technology, and he took them all home in three trips. They had sound cards, network cards and decent drives, and most of them had decent display adapters. There were even a few 10base-only hubs waiting to be scrounged.

After cleaning them out and reloading them, he hooked up a cluster of them into their own network, and then they were a musical playground for Csound and Timidity and Lilypond and Audacity and any other open-source music program he could get to compile on them.

It was amazing what you could dump out of a soundcard if you were willing to compose the waveform yourself. The card's main output was just a DAC, after all, a sixteen-bit digital-to-analog converter, the same wordlength that a CD used to store music. Rather than do it all on one overworked machine, you could have six machines, all dumping their outputs into a passive mixer and then straight into another soundcard to record to hard disk.

'Have to see about grabbing the output as thirty-two-bit ints and summing them across the network instead. I'll lose a lot of noise that way as the cluster gets bigger. I can pipe the sounds through more soft effects, too... when I get around to it.'

Right now, it was still more fun to play around and see what sounded interesting, whether it was ambience with an amplitude-modulation techno beat and FM scratches, bell-like microtonal clusters of sinewaves, or sound-trails, like listening to the misty shape of Bridal Veil Falls.

Maybe she should put together a second cluster for working on that network mixdown idea? That way she wouldn't take a chance on messing up her current music system until the new one was working. There were plenty of beige boxes to commit to it, after all: nearly a dozen were sitting, cleaned up and waiting, in the corner.

The first step was always to vacuum them out. The layers of dust inside formed an unwelcome blanket buffering the chips from the cooling airflow, making them run hotter and wear out earlier. Even the ones found behind research labs. Especially those.

'You need a breathing mask on yourself, and a wet filter on the exhaust port of the vacuum cleaner. It could have been lethal. I was lucky to get off so lightly, I know that now...'

There was no telling where these machines had been or what they had been exposed to, but it was all recorded in the tendrils of dust that built up inside. Tiny spider webs, fibers from furniture, carpeting and clothing, and anything that was dusty when it spilled or when it dried or was tracked in, were all sucked in by the cooling fans and deposited in microgeological layers all over the circuit boards and the devices soldered onto them.

Disturb those layers and you revisited that secret history. Without a wet filter on the vacuum, you sifted the finer particles right through the collection bag and out into the air... your air. With just the right blend of that dust, from just the right sequence of computers discarded across several nearby industrial parks on a particularly good dumpster-diving day...

She was under for a week, in deep shock in an ICU, while her soft tissues adapted to the imposed new state. All her prior memories were recorded from a male role's viewpoint, with male hormonal biases and implicit self-image expectations. Everything from her awakening onward was recorded into memory filtered by female brain patterns and hormonal biases and an unfamiliar new shape, with no automatic role perspective from which to judge and evaluate them. She no longer had a male role in the play of conversation and civility, but she had not been trained from birth in the girl's part in the script.

It was liberating, refreshing, and confusing unto dizziness, because everything that mattered had to be examined for validity. A lot of habitual evaluations were now reversed in polarity and had to be resolved with her history by introspection. "Boobs-exposed" was now only mildly "opportunity", whereas "stiff dick in public" was no longer "don't look or they'll think you're queer". Even "skirt" was no longer "what does it expose", instead it was now "what does it cover, is it warm enough, and does it match the rest of the outfit". Habit kept the naked female body interesting and arousing, but now a tight male butt was too, naturally so, which made for embarrassingly obvious triple-takes: "Look -- avoid looking -- never mind all that and look".

'Some people would kill for this...'

"Karen? Karen?"

'Oh, yeah, that's my name now... and that's Mike calling it.'

She turned to call out to the open doorway, "In here! I'm swapping a box in the sound cluster."

His voice got closer, clearer. "Oh, okay. How long?"

In a moment he was at the doorway, his darkly electric eyes meeting hers, taking in her appearance and surroundings in the periphery. He stepped in, carefully through the clutter of tools and cables, and leaned in to kiss her uplifted cheek.

"Another fifteen minutes, maybe."

"Cool." He grinned and turned away, walking over to his console, leaving her free to return her attention to her task and her musings.

Despite all the sampling and the laboratory investigations, they never found out what it was that caused it, whether it was the dust from one place or the combination from a few.

'Will I ever revert? Probably not. The male is XY; the female is XX, a foundation subset. We all start out looking female, before androgen brings the boys out to play. And that Y chromosome is a complex little self-contained knot, that much I know from reading the news on the Net. What can replicate it once it's gone?

'Mike's okay. He knows not to push when I'm feeling pressured. Just like girls who started out that way, sometimes I just want to snuggle and be warm and cozy, and sometimes even that's too much proximity because I need my space. And then again, sometimes I need... Well, yeah, sometimes I need. Heh.'

Box by box, she shelled into each one of the machines on this little network and put it into an orderly shutdown. When the last one, the one the KVM box was currently switched to, displayed "Power down," she went down the row, flipping power switches. The relative quiet left behind as their fans stopped reminded her of the hospital they took her to when, still outwardly male but feeling woozy, she collapsed at work as the change got visibly underway.

'Imagine if I hadn't been at work when I went into a coma... I spent a week in that coma while my guts were rearranged. Then recovery: that was three weeks in a hospital, with people in dark suits coming by to ask me everything... but they saw me change. Imagine if it happened at home, how hard it would be to prove I was me... assuming I survived, that is.'

And then, of course, there were the months afterward while the biological changes were propagated outward into the documents that cluttered this civilization, and onward into society itself. The ripples were reflected back as more 'suits' visiting haphazardly to ask just one more question, scrutinize her setup and her movements from just one more angle, and negotiate just one more tweak of their noninvasive but pervasive monitoring of her life.

When she got her vacuum cleaner back, it was cleaner than it had ever been since she bought it, and that was as amusing as it was surprising. She knew that everything which was in it when they took it was now in HazMat confinement in a laboratory somewhere. For all they knew, though, the missing component of the catalyst could have been something in one of the dumpsters she had raided over the past year or so: hi-tech used heavy metals and rare earths a lot, and they were persistent.

Still, she didn't even start feeling strange until she cleaned those boxes, and that was days after the pickup run that brought them home, so one or more of the ingredients in that ambient potion had to have been vacuumed up out of a computer into her handheld vacuum cleaner and thus into her breathing space.

She glanced over at the vacuum cleaner. Her gaze was drawn to the new wet-filter housing over the exhaust port. Mike built and attached that for her shortly after they got together, after he asked why a post-op had periods and she told him the truth. It used moist drip-coffee filters, in a stack to lower its impedance, in a parallel "sandwich-seal" arrangement like a monolithic ceramic capacitor. It was an elegant hack that applied learned electron-flow behavior to moving air.

Mike said that, before, he wouldn't have much cared if it happened to him, because new hardware was always fun, but now that he knew her he wanted to stay plug-compatible with her. And keep her alive and safe, of course.

She realized, with a quick glance at the back of Mike's head, that she hadn't really looked in a while at how the finessing of that compatibility was proceeding. She stood up and took a quick peek in the closest mirror, one of the many that now cluttered the place. She was analyzing that mental snapshot as she knelt back down by the machine she was replacing. The bones of her face were still softening. They were less angular now. 'All that bone is draining down into my hips, following my femaleness around, surrounding that new cluster of organs that I never had when I was a man... Hm, well, that's not quite true.'

After it happened, she read up on it, all over the Net. What was between her legs had never been an 'undifferentiated smear in the pelvic region'. It had all gone from being testicles to being ovaries, scrotum to labia, with a penis which faded inside to peer out from behind a protective hood which was once foreskin... And, who knows where all the intricate details of the uterus were drawn from, but they were all there before in male camouflage, fully functional but just waiting to be reconfigured and repurposed. Even the Skenes Gland, one of her absolutely favorite parts of her new shape, at least when Mike was putting his hands on and in her, had once been an unremarkable prostate.

Now she stared down at the deceptive smoothness of her torso in the area below the crease of her tee-shirt that represented her bellybutton, thinking about what was hidden within it.

'That's one complex piece of machinery, the more complex for being made out of meat, my meat. It's a hormone-driven state-machine, running one sequence now, my menses. It's a two-piston blood engine, because the ovaries alternate their egg deliveries. If I ever decide to do anything with it, it'll run a different sequence, one that runs for forty weeks and takes over the whole damn system before it emits the result, and the return-value is a new person...

'How in the world does that much state-logic get designed into meat and coded into strands of protein? And, even more tricky, it's like Thompson's backdoored C compiler: those ovaries come complete with eggs, so it's already completed seeing to its replication by the time a girl is born. I wonder whose daughters mine are, whose compiler they're carrying. What a moby hack...'

Even as she was getting acquainted with her new hardware, the Men In Suits moved her to a new town and a new circle of acquaintances. They got her into a new job there so that references on her resume wouldn't be checked and open her to awkward questions about her gender and how she acquired it. They even eased her into a condo and a decent used car and a falsified medical history which stated that she had been through SRS. They also ordered her to stop dumpster-diving, and signed her up to get offered the older hardware coming out of their offices so she would comply.

They were thus paying her to pass herself off as a post-op transsexual and shut up about the fact that something environmental, something that humans were doing to the environment in their rush to technological mastery of the planet, could change a person's sex as easily as that of a clownfish. She could understand why: as long as it didn't happen again, or happen too often, it wouldn't cause a panic. A panic, about something like that in the wrong hands, was likely to make heads roll in the places where political power was gathered and kept. They were paying the problem to go away, and they kept checking to make sure it stayed bought.

'Now they're offering me therapy... Therapy for what? They don't know what caused this, they don't know what it's like, and they don't know what's going to happen to me. That whole therapy group looks military, anyway, so this is probably more them putting a monitor in place for if I'm losing it, so they can catch me before it goes public. That, and summarize anything interesting to their researchers.

'Therapy for them, then, and I guess they need it. Fine; an hour a month gives me a face to talk to if I need something. Me, I just take it as it comes, I guess.

'I got over it, really, as soon as my first period was over. That was as bad as it gets unless I decide to make a baby inside me; that's reassuring.'

Her mother had made a comment once: "Take care of your teeth: an infected tooth hurts worse than birth-labor." In spite of the advice, she had one wisdom tooth that went that way, during her forty-plus years of being a man.

'I know how bad that was, so I know childbirth's not that bad. I handled that tooth long enough to get it pulled; I know I can handle pushing out a baby. Do I need to, though?

'Some of it depends on the guy, I guess. But, then, do I want some guy in my life all the time, inescapable, because we're both parents to a child of mine?'

As she plugged all the cabling into the back of the computer she was swapping into the cluster, she tried to imagine being a mother, being tethered to her timeline by a child at the breast who was latched on in abject dependence for eighteen years and never really letting go thereafter. The faceless guy, tethered to her by the baby, and always wanting back inside her to make another one, was easier to visualize, but just as foreign.

'Not yet. I'm still adjusting to being me. For now, let's let the new hardware be the baby.'

She brought the back of her wrist up against the bulk of her breast, compressing it upward, reminding herself of how pleasantly firm and fresh it all was. Then, to even out the sensations, she brought it up against the other one, pushing it up and then allowing it to recoil back into place in turn. No sodden sacks of skin, these breasts: they had real substance. She smiled.

'I've got time. Whatever did this, it reset the aging sequencer. I'm probably something like 22 or 23 inside, they said. I've got time to decide. I'm not at the use-it-or-lose-it point yet.'

She had enough company in her life already: a housemate who was sometimes a mate. Mike.

'Another loner like me, and that suits me just fine. I'm still hooking up my networks, deciding where my signal's gonna go...' She smiled at the thoughts that had come out to play amid her introspection. 'Although...'

She looked up from the cluster, pulling an errant fall of hair out of the way as she did so, to stare at Mike some more. He was intent at the keyboard, and he looked so sharpened, so powerful, that way... His looks agreed with his inner being in that moment, presenting his inner fire to his work. It was escaping through his eyes, its flickers of flame dancing across the screen, waiting to pounce with unexpected thoughts and new ideas.

He was a true hacker: one of those who liked to improve the things around them. They were called 'hackers' because they started by daring to modify things they didn't fully understand, hacking away machete-like at all the implicit hookups until they made things run their way, however inelegant the solution. Then they did it again, smarter this time, using what they'd learned from the first try, but still committing a hatchet-job on the code's prior meanings.

She supposed she was probably a hacker, too, of sorts, but more on the hardware side of things where the hatchet job was all too obvious, a kluge for all to see. 'A hardware hacker with hacked hardware...' She snorted an inner laugh at that thought.

'And then you get better than that, of course: more refined as you learn to intuit what isn't in the documents or comments, only in the code itself, and how it implies what it's connected to. You develop an elegant deftness, aiming for that butterfly touch where you insert one line that changes everything as it folds over the problem space into the solution space, in the sublime perfection of the true hack.' Mike had told her that: that was how he did it, and that was how it felt to him, at least on good days.

She liked to look at that, and liked even more to be involved with it. It didn't matter somehow that he was male or that she used to be, instead it was those hands of his, expressive and powerful and trembling with eagerness at the keyboard, waiting to be unleashed. And, sometimes, with her permission, those hands were unleashed on her, on her hookups, solving her loneliness and his with the connections they made.

She went over to him and gently put her hands on his shoulders, gently rubbing his shoulder-blades with her thumbs as she peered at his screen, comfortable in waiting.

He leaned his head so that his hair caressed the back of her hand. It was an acknowledgement and an offer even as his gaze never wavered from the screen, from the code he was mentally flensing out of its obscurity.

She responded by leaning down against him, letting her breasts compress against his shoulderblades, and felt him lean back against her, increasing the compression, in acknowledgement. She breathed lightly against the nape of his neck, where his braid crossed his collar, and then straightened up and walked away.

She knew that, when he was done with his current task, she would now be at the head of his queue. This was as it should be: he had awaited her attentions and now she was awaiting his, each respectful of the other's processes. She kept all of her interruptions maskable; he returned the trust by assigning her a high priority. As she settled into her new state of arousal, she was consciously doing the same for him.

She walked back over to the cluster. The machine she had pulled out was the slowest of them all, as well as having the crappiest sound card. She already had another use for it in mind, one where she didn't need the sound card at all.

Console unit last, she walked down the line of machines, flipping switches, powering up the cluster, and sat down to watch the boot-time system messages scrolling past. The last item in this machine's rc.local was a ping of all the other boxes on the little network, to check that they had all booted up normally. That script reported good responses from everything, paused for her to read the result, and then the machine started the X layer, switched the screen mode and began composing the overlaying that made up a graphic logon screen.

She logged into the desktop. Then she smiled and looked over at Mike, trying to estimate his time-to-response. Judging by his hunched posture and intent look, she had a few minutes yet before he would get around to servicing her request. She grinned and launched the cluster into the first movement of Beethoven's Third Symphony. It was music that he liked to make love to her by, and that suited her current mood just fine.

Mike turned and grinned over at her, then turned back to his screen with evident new zeal. She knew she was distracting him now, a little, but it was still his choice when and how to respond as his grin promised her he would. She looked him over while she listened and waited, enjoying the fierce look about him as he attacked and defeated incompetence in his own or someone else's code yet again, actively disallowing dissatisfaction. The memory of all the times he applied that zeal to her in his bed aroused her even more now.

She shelled into the new machine and created a directory there for all her music tooling. By now, she had a shell script that would fetch, configure, compile and install each of those applications in turn. She checked the free disk space, then copied over and started that installation script; it would run to completion unattended even as the music played.

She looked over at Mike again. He was typing in quick bursts, which meant that he probably had everything solved in his head and was committing his changes to code. Soon, she knew, he would type a few more lines, faster still for being rote commands, then loudly slap the Enter key on the last command. Then he would turn in his chair and look at her intently.

She sighed and folded her arms across her breasts. Now that she was noticing them, they tingled a little at the tips and ached for attention within. She tightened her arms to squeeze them, causing them to tingle and ache even more. She pressed her thumbs against her nipples, feeling them hardening and teasing her own hunger. She would be ready when he responded. Her older body was recycled and ready for new uses while she cautiously redid her hookups and decided what networks she would join. For now, that would do.