Punishment

[3]

KNOX’S FATHER PRESSED HIM up against the trunk of some kind of knotty tree and glared into his son’s face. Knox felt a lump digging into his back as his father jabbed him in the shoulder with an aggressive finger, which made Knox spill the

drink he was holding onto his shoes.

“Whoops.” He giggled.

“Wipe that smirk off your face,” his father snapped at him, then glanced at the holo floating right beside Knox—Knox’s own secret file. “And shut these off, right this instant.”

“Oh, come on!” Knox said. “Your friends can take a joke, can’t they?”

It really was an ingenious bit of hacking he’d pulled off. Knox was rather proud of it. He’d entered the system through the musical target analysis program, accessing everyone’s sonic taste profiles. There wasn’t much security around those files, because no one imagined that the consequences of someone’s musical preferences being hacked were terribly dire.

From those files, however, Knox could pinpoint the unique code that linked every person’s biofeed to their datastream. The data was in their blood, after all, and the datastream tracked them with a set of unique codes that every transmitter could pick up. That way—the ads, the music, and the communications systems—everything could always find you. Those little bits of personal identification made the whole system work. Once Knox had that, he could cross that code with his father’s private files— the password was, cruelly, his mother’s name, after all—and BOOM! With those bits linked, Knox could share everything his father had collected on all his guests.

Knox didn’t see it as leaking corporate secrets. He was leaking people’s own information back to them, leaking what they already knew about themselves. Knox was leaking all over his father’s fancy friends.

He had to chuckle at that turn of phrase. He couldn’t believe no one else was laughing. 

At the current moment, Dr. Elvarthi was reading about the affair he’d had with one of his lab technicians, and the president of Birla Nanotech was watching a holo of himself eating small handfuls of dirt he kept in a desk drawer in his office.

All the kids his age were reading their parents’ files, but then, they weren’t laughing either. Simi looked so glum reading about his dads’ plans for divorce, and Nine didn’t seem to appreciate his parents’ dwindling wealth being shared with everyone else’s parents. But it was funny! Every one of them was a hypocrite in one way or another. Did no one but Knox have a sense of humor?

Knox’s own file—every petty theft or clever bit of vandalism—was also shared, so that his father’s friends didn’t think him withholding or unjust.

Chey and Nine switched to the file of their school’s headmaster, who had not been invited to the party, but whose file Knox thought might be of interest to all the gathered parents and students of the high-end institution. The fact that their headmaster had been fired from three other lux schools in the past three years was of great interest. At least his friends found that amusing. He gave them a smirk and wink, hoped it made up for embarrassing their parents. Simi shook his head. Knox often forgot that not everyone felt about their parents the way he felt about his father. 

“You think you’re being cute?” Knox’s father snapped at him. “You are not only damaging your reputation and mine, you are hurting SecuriTech’s shareholders right now. My business is secrecyand you are damaging that business. Shut it off this instant.” 

Knox set his jaw. Stared at his father. He wasn’t smirking anymore, but he wasn’t backing down. “It’s no big deal. Just a bunch of gossip anyway.”