A related sidebar. Thanks, Tikatu, Eternal Density and Varda's Servant. Made a few edits...
31: Root of All Evil
Princeton University, Holder Hall, before the 'trouble'-
Shocked, he'd pulled back enough to become aware of his body again, and now sat blinking at a pale monitor screen. The money was still there, despite the transfer; as real as his work station, the Knuth reward check, his shadowy dorm room and his girlfriend.
Just to be certain, he paged back a bit, shuffling addresses and files without ever touching the keyboard. And again, there it was. Weird.
John cleared his dry throat and then reached for the can of doctoredginger ale that sat upon his desk. Nearly knocked it over in the process, as usual, because regaining control of his body was hard, after a long immersion. His muscles were cramped and his eyes extremely tired, the feel of black tee shirt and jeans oddly rough against his skin. There were other, more important distractions, though.
"Drew, come here a minute," he said to the girl. She'd been laying face-up on his bed, using her laptop to access the school's computers and edit a few final exams. Now she snapped alert and rolled to her feet, a vision in stark black and white, dressed like a discarded rag doll and made up like a lovely ghost. Her hair was dead black and swung as she walked. She smelled of asphodel, and her contact lenses were yellow.
"What's up, Tracy?" the girl replied, bounding over.
(Funny thing, but all the medical encyclopedias and human reproduction classes had somehow missed a single, vital fact: it felt really good. No one had ever told him that a female, sufficiently motivated to take charge of the situation, could cause such intense, vivid explosions. Tough to miss, you'd think, but that was adults, for you; pretty much blind to everything that mattered.)
Autumn Drew leaned comfortably over the back of his chair, placing one badly scratched hand on the near armrest, another, fondly, upon the nape of his neck. Examining the screen, she straightened up again, and folded her arms.
"Your dad's loose-change account. Yeah, I get it. You stand to inherit billions. Lucky you. Is that all?"
He shook his blond head, momentarily confused by the girl's sour reaction.
"No. There are a couple of houses, some aircraft and a ranch, too… but that's not what I wanted you to see. Take a look at this."
John paged forward again, flipping through files like a card sharp with a fresh deck. Seconds later, he'd pulled up one of his own bank accounts.
"Hey…" Drew breathed, leaning down again. "Where'd that come from?"
For, there again was his father's money. All of it.
"Tracy, what did you do?"
Her black hair swung down past his up-turned face, brushing cheek and shoulder. Impatiently, Drew tucked the coarse strands away behind one very pierced ear. Imbedded within the canal was an internet music receiver, hardly noticeable but for its faint, rhythmic buzzing. She frowned at him, perfectly capable of downloading a new album while awaiting his answer.
"Not sure," he admitted. "I was messing around in there, giving myself unrestricted loans and paying them off again to boost my credit limit… and I think I somehow duped the funds."
Drew blinked, visibly shifting gears.
"You duplicated your dad's money? To your own account? Free and clear?"
So it would appear. Quite solemnly, John nodded, adding,
"Hang on. I'll try again… go after that pile he thinks he's got hidden in the Bahamas."
A touch to the cyberlink, a swift mental adjustment, and John was once more within, anchored to his body by the slim silver thread that was Autumn Drew, caressing the back of his neck.
Any kind of anchor was much valued, for he'd just re-entered chaos. Within lay an insanely shifting, infinite universe of crackling grey, pierced throughout with bursts of vivid neon and torrents of fiery data. Glittering grid lines spread away in all directions, further than eye could see or thought could reach. There were nodes, servers, skulking viruses and the periodic sheet-lightning of bulk mails.
A weirdly alluring parallel world, one that John had to be ramped up with alertness tabs and energy drinks to fully access. One that he'd recently begun spending many hours in, venturing a little further each time. The lure of open water and foreign shores…
Linking himself to a forged ATM transfer request, John hopped three servers in less than full reaction time, winding up at the well-padded retirement account of 'Jefferson Troy'. The International Commerce Bank of Freeport, Bahamas, pandered to billionaires like his father; men and women anxious to disguise the unseemly heft of their private fortunes. Except that this particular bank didn't do a very good job.
John had long since cracked every one of their passwords, as well as the 'secure' algorithm that generated new ones. He'd made a quiet hash of their cut-rate countermeasures, too, snooping about at will.
Once again he passed firewall and security checks, quickly dropping the $5.00 transfer request and setting to work to create a new loan. Jeff Tracy, generous soul that he was, was about to lend his beloved son five hundred million dollars, at a 12 percentrate. Big business… but the loan, the transfer, deposit and repayment would take place in less than an atto-second. In fact, it took longer for John Tracy to blink than to accomplish all of this virtual sleight-of-hand. And he still wound up owing $53.00 interest. Not a problem, though.
As always, in these quirky mental states, John took a few unauthorized shortcuts, transferring the money back to his father's account through a buggy, little-used side route. And therein lay the magic. Somehow, his swiftly coded foo-commands both transferred the funds, and didn't.
It copied them, leaving his father un-defrauded, and John Tracy five hundred million dollars richer. So much for those pride-induced student loans, and with the funds to bribe a few stubborn data clerks, his persistentlymissing brother was as good as found.
Drew kissed the top of his head, adding fuel to that slow-burn satisfaction and hauling him back to the weirdly slow'real' world. Damn, he felt good.
The girl's eyes were enormous, her mouth falling open just far enough to reveal the brassy glint of her tongue stud.
"Holy cats, Tracy. You're not just rich, you're frickin' loaded! Could you do it again?"
Why not? So long as the bugs were there to be exploited, and he could warp data faster than they could block him… any account, anywhere, could be duplicated, for anyone.
So, he nodded, and Drew hugged him. Self-starved and criss-crossed with old cuts, to John she seemed as perfectly beautiful as the marble angels in a foggy churchyard.
"Okay to text Rick and Denice?" she asked him, pulling away just a little.
"Yeah."
The other half of their set (quick-witted, temperamental Backslash and scowling DNC) arrived within minutes. Rick (who'd probably be buried in that Cubs jacket) rocketed around the dorm like a wired ferret, halting every few circuits to repeat in monotone wonder the figure that had just flashed up on his account screen. Even Denice looked pleased, the amber eyes in her tan, freckled face blinking repeatedly. Her hand clasped John's shoulder hard enough to hurt as she said, with dignity,
"Thanks, K. Whatever you need, whenever you need it, I'm there. No questions asked."
She meant it, too. DNC might look like a scruffy Latina drop-out, but she was every bit as fierce as she was smart.
…And she it was who caught on to certain potential difficulties. Just like Drew, Denice thought more than she spoke, and trusted almost no one.
"John," she said to him, after Drew finally succeeded in calming Backslash, "you gotta be careful, man. We all do. Anyone finds out what you got… what you can do… they'll try to make you do the same for them. Or, they'll kill you."
She was very serious now, enough to keep using his real name rather than 'K' or 'Kryptonian'.
"We keep this on the down-low, understand? We don't do anything stupid, buy Puerto Rico, or nothing. Got it, John? Everybody? And our mouths stay shut."
Denice had a set of polished brass knuckles, a last gift from her older brother. When agitated, she had a tendency to put a hand in her jeans pocket and slip them on. The smooth, cold rings felt almost as strong and protective as Tomas had been.
"Nobody talks. We stay in school, get our degrees, and live our lives. Safe, secure and rich."
Except that it didn't turn out that way. Trouble and money have a way of finding each other. In their case, first through an unscrupulous professor interested in harnessing their talents. That one they wriggled out of, more or less safely.
Many years later, though, trouble would rise up again, this time in the form of certain inquiries, made on behalf of a murderous senator.
Rick never talked. Neither did Denice. They died at the hands of a brutal cyborg assassin, never having told what they knew. By the time his agents acquired Drew, however, the senator had learned something of subtlety, and the art of setting a trap.
Destabilizing WorldGov involved bringing down its technological knights, especially International Rescue. For this, the senator required three things; inside information, money and Jeff Tracy's corpse. He intended to have them, too, though not necessarily in that order.