Day One - Homeroom

Friday, January 9
3215 AD

With consciousness came the dull sounds of far away machinery, the earthy metallic smell of plascrete, and the feeling of complete and utter safety and warmth. This triggered a half-second of initial surprise before Nack remembered where he was and how he'd gotten there.

Three days ago - which was, as far as Nack was now concerned, when his life had actually began - he had struck out on his own and quickly found himself in an alleyway of the great city of Mobotropolis. Fortunately for him, he'd been picked up out of the gutter yesterday by a tech-savvy gang of Mobians calling themselves the Hacker-Dackers. They'd taken him in, fed him, and given him a place to sleep.

And speaking of sleep, Nack had gotten plenty enough of that. He pushed his coverlet off, sat up, and swung his feet down to the floor. Only a few short steps later, he was standing before a tiny sink and mirror combo that was built directly into the wall. He turned the faucet on, splashed a bit of the water into his eyes to help him wake up fully, then stared at the reflection in the mirror.

He looked himself over appraisingly, checking thoroughly for any mussed fur and pressing it flat where he found it. Yesterday he had only met a couple of the Dackers in any depth. Today he was going to be introducing himself more properly to the group, and he wanted to make a good impression. He wasn't sure just how much looks really mattered to these people - he certainly knew he himself wasn't too concerned about them - but it never hurt to be prepared.

Past the purple fur that he was trying to slick down into obedience, Nack's most striking feature jutted out nearly an inch from either side of his upper lip. His oversized fangs, the result of a recessive genetic trait making itself known for the first time in a few generations, were generally the first thing that caught people's eye when they looked at him. Nack was never really sure whether this was a good thing or a bad thing . . . the fact that he naturally looked like something out of a horror vid seemed to unsettle folks, a reaction which Nack hadn't yet fully figured out how to turn to his advantage.

For the moment, he'd just have to let the chips fall where they might on that point. The rest he had slightly more control over, so he did what he could with what he had to make himself look presentable. He and his sparse clothing had both gotten a good scrubbing down the previous night, fortunately, so there wasn't too much he had to do. Once he finished, he took a deep breath, released it, and turned around to glance around at his new room.

He'd gotten plenty of time yesterday to look at it, of course. After a short tour of the major facilities in the Dacker base followed by a battery of tests, Nack had been shuffled off to this room and asked not to leave it for any reason until the next day. Not yet sure exactly what would happen to him if he did, he'd opted to stay put for the time being and explore his new environment.

Saying that the room he had been given was sparse would have been an insult to sparseness. The walls were bare paneling under a flat drywall roof and over a grey plascrete floor. A single old-fashioned light bulb - which Nack had neglected to turn off the previous night - lit the room dimly, but adequately enough for getting around. Not that getting around was difficult since there was very little space to get around to and hardly any furniture to get underfoot. Besides the army cot that Nack had slept on, there was a mini-fridge in one corner and a small foot locker in another. Nothing else.

To Nack's eyes, it was the most beautiful place on Mobius. With a short nod of satisfaction at his surroundings, Nack decided it was finally time to set out and meet his new world.

The hallway outside Nack's room was a continuation on the theme, the only differences being the higher ceiling, greater length, and greater number of doors. Nack slid the magkey he had been given into his own door's slot, securely locking it. He wasn't sure just how safe that could possibly be in a den full of hackers, but it certainly made him feel better. That done, he turned and immediately ran face first into a moving vehicle.

At least that was his impression until he gathered himself off the floor and found he'd run into someone rather than something. He put his hand out to help the red fox Mobian up, but had his hand slapped away.

"Shine, sirrah!" the fox spat, his face twisted in anger as he picked himself up. He stepped up into Nack's face and snarled. "Whycom en-peep yer skollyin'?! Ye malfun?! Oughta fate ya! Give whycom I oughta en-fate ya, else ye 'n' I . . . w'all split the father playgrid, savvy?"

Nack's jaw worked, but nothing came out because he wasn't exactly sure how to respond to what was pure gibberish to him. He was pretty certain that he was being threatened in some way, of course, but not quite sure with what. He could definitely tell that it was a threat that could be acted upon, however. Up that close, he could see that the boy he was facing had to be at least a year or two younger than he, but the thin muscles corded through the boy's body rippled with barely constrained power. He was just about to form some sort of apology when another voice cut through the air and interrupted him.

"Tek-tek!" the voice said melodically yet firmly. "Whatcom spire inplace? Whycom ye en-check wit' Meth?"

The boy's entire expression change into one of mild fear and consternation, as if he'd gotten caught doing something he knew he wasn't supposed to be doing. He turned away from Nack to face the newcomer, jerked a thumb behind him, and started, "SFB inpla-"

"Tek-teeeeeeek . . . " the other said, stretching out the word - name? - warningly.

Grinding his teeth in frustration, Tek-tek nearly growled, "Own . . . own malfun. Backspace." Frowning deeply, he turned back to Nack, performed a short half-bow, and repeated, "Backspace." He then stepped around the weasel and continued down the corridor.

"Uh, thanks?" Nack said cautiously once the other boy had disappeared around a corner. He turned to see that the owner of the melodious voice was a Mobian lion in his early twenties. His mane was long and tied off in the back but cropped close under his chin, and he had a sublimely mild expression that immediately put Nack at ease.

"No worries, brah."

At least this one speaks Common, Nack thought, relaxing a little more. Sort of. Out loud he asked, "So what was that about exactly?"

The lion gave a little snort-laugh. "You'll have to forgive Tek-tek," he said. "He's one of the lifers we have hanging out around here. Never seen the sun, never spoken anything but the speek. It's makes them a little anti-social, but they're radical at the consoles. The name's Big Ten, by the way. You're Nack The Weasel, right?"

"Right," Nack said as they briefly shook hands.

"It looks like I'm right on time, then. I'm supposed to take you down to the mess hall for breakfast, answer any questions you have, and then take you to your first class."

Nack frowned a little bit. "Class?"

Big ten waved his hand and said, "That's just what we call it, little brah. Try not to think of it like any school you've been to or heard of. You'll see. Now, how about that breakfast?"

The Dacker mess hall was smaller than the giant workroom Nack had found himself in at the very beginning of the previous day, but not by very much. It was certainly noisier and quite possibly filled with even more people. Tables of all shapes, sizes and descriptions littered the room haphazardly, and Nack couldn't be certain if he could see any two chairs that matched.

"It's pretty informal here, guy," Ten informed him. "Just grab whatever you want from the processors while I find us somewhere to sit, okay?"

Nack nodded and began to work his way through the confusing mass. It immediately found it difficult, and he was chagrined to notice that everyone else seemed to be slipping and sliding around each other effortlessly. Finally, more through determination and a couple of rough elbow jabs, he made it through to one of the several wall-mounted food processing stations. It was an old-style machine with no voice activation, but that seemed understandable upon retrospect. It would've taken a military-grade VOX to sort anything useful out of the overwhelming chatter filling the room.

Quickly pressing some buttons before he could be shoved out of the way, Nack received something almost resembling what he had ordered and made his way back to where Big Ten was sitting. He was somewhat miffed to see that Ten had already managed to grab his own food, find them both seats, and finish nearly half his meal.

"Eat up," Ten said. "You've got a big day ahead of you."

The food was actually edible despite its appearance. Nack hungrily dug into it at first, but started to slow down about halfway through.

"So, Ten," he fairly shouted as he started cutting a slice of ham. "You said I could ask you questions?"

The lion smiled over his glass of juice. "That's right, brah," he replied, his voice oddly carrying well over all the noise. "Ask away."

"How am I supposed to ask you anything over all this?!"

Ten shrugged slightly and set his glass down. "You get used to it," he said. "And besides, you just did ask me a question. I think we'll do fine. So what do you want to know, brah?"

"Well, I guess the most important thing is . . . who are you guys exactly? What do you do, how do you do it, what's the deal?"

"They didn't tell you anything last night?" Ten asked.

"Just the basics," answered Nack. "That you're a gang of hackers that steal from the info-rich and give to the info-poor, taking your own cut from time to time."

"Yah, that's about as basic as it gets," Ten said with a chuckle. "Okay, before we get into that, I have to ask you . . . do you know what the diginet is?"

"I don't think there's anybody who doesn't."

Ten's eyebrows rose marginally. With his perpetually hooded eyes, it made him look as if he were particularly surprised to be awake. "You'd be amazed," he said. "But okay, do you know how the diginet got started, then?"

Nack took a bite of his food, shook his head, and said, "Alrighty, then, I guess that's one I don't know. Never did pay much attention in history class."

"You'll have to start paying attention now, brah," Ten said seriously. "But okay, that's where we'll start. See, way way back when the Acorn Kingdom first united the entire world of Mobius under one banner about three and a quarter thousand years ago, they took a whole lot of steps to make sure it stayed united. One of those steps was the creation of what eventually became known as the diginet.

"There had been small numbers of computers hooked together before that, sure, but this was the ushering in of something different. A worldwide digital network, connecting everybody with everybody else. Information from all around the globe, right at your fingertips, day or night. It was a beautiful thing, man."

"And this is when the Hacker-Dackers were formed?"

Ten held up a hand. "That's jumping a little ahead of things, brah," he said. "No, the Dackers weren't born there, but the group that eventually became the Dackers was. See, even though most were as big on personal freedom and shared information back then as they are now, there were still a lot of people that didn't see that way. They were either still stuck on the old ways of thought from the multi-nation days, or they had things to hide, or whatever else you might think of. These people kept their networks off the main diginet, hid their information behind intrusion countermeasures, and pretty much just tried to keep things to themselves.

"Which, hey," Ten said, straightening up and putting both hands in the air, "that's all cool, man. If people want their privacy, they should have it. The problem was that some of these dudes . . . well, them keeping their secrets was causing other people harm. And they knew it was. Some of them were doing it specifically because it was causing that hurt.

"Enter the hacker, brah. No one remembers anymore what the names of any particular groups were, but we do know that hackers started banding together every once in a while to stop this sort of thing. They'd break into the locked down systems and broadcast whatever they found to anyone who needed it. Not all of them went around it the right way or for the right reasons, but there were enough that did."

Ten spread his arms as wide as he could in the crowded space. "And here we are," he said. "A few thousand years later, and we have the Hacker-Dackers, the spiritual offspring of those long ago console cowboys. We're not the only hacker gang on the planet, or even just this quadrant. But we are one of the largest I've ever heard of, and probably the most well-known."

Nack looked skeptical. "I've never heard of you."

"'Well-known' is relative in this case, brah," he said with a shrug.

"Ah," said Nack. "Alright, so that's where you came from. But what do you do?"

"The same thing the original gangs did. The same thing you were already told. We fight the good fight, help the world where we can, and take what we need when we need it as long as it doesn't hurt anybody else in the process."

"You and Breva both keep saying that," Nack said a little impatiently, mentioning the ferret girl that had inducted him into the gang. "The whole thing about taking things on occasion. So you do get recompensated for what you do? Or don't you? What's going on there?"

Big Ten smiled benignly, looking for a moment almost like one of those cheesy What Would the Walkers Do? stickers Nack had seen street vendors selling. The weasel wouldn't have believed anyone could actually achieve the level of lazy cheerfulness drawn on the masked representations of the Ancient Walkers, but Ten obviously had a lot of practice.

"If you're looking for excessive monetary gain here, little brah, I'm afraid you've hitched your board up on the wrong wave," he said. "We get everything we need here. Nobody wants for anything. We make sure of that. Anything else is just wasteful."

"Okay, fine," Nack said, truly impatient now. "Money's not really what I'm after anyway. But . . . what about recognition? You said it was relative, but folks'll still know we're doing good, right?"

"The right people will know at the right times, guy," Ten replied. "Fame is pretty much the same as fortune around here. You'll get what you need, even if it's more or less than you want. And after a while, you'll find you don't want any more than you need anyway."

The smile still lit up Ten's face. 'A lot of practice' is right, thought Nack with sudden realization. He's had this conversation before, a hundred times with a hundred other new kids. He decided to drop it and switch tact.

"Okay, so, saving the world," he said. "How do I fit in with that? What am I going to be doing with my time here?"

"That depends," Ten replied. "There's a lot of overlap, but there's basically two kinds of people around here. The line is roughly drawn between the brains and the brawn."

Nack looked around at the throng of people surrounding them. Just as he'd noticed yesterday, there were marked similarities amongst everyone present. Thin, sleek, knotted muscles rippled under everyone's fur. Everyone had at least a mini-computer strapped to themselves somewhere, and many were festooned with an even greater number and variety of electronic gear.

"I know how it looks to the untrained eye," Ten said to Nack's obvious confusion, "but trust me, brah. The line is there. On the one side, we have the hackers. That's a big 'duh', of course, but it has to be said. On the other side, we've got the bods, short for 'bodyguards'.

"Hackers still work out. They know enough self-defense to handle themselves in a tight situation. But a well-trained bod can take down three or four attackers at once without breaking a sweat. Bods still work with computers. They know enough to crack a door passcode or silence an alarm, but they're nowhere near the technical wizards our hackers are. We like to train everyone up on a little bit of everything because it helps provide balance and efficiency. Everyone helps everyone else do their job."

"I'm gonna go ahead and guess that bods do what their name suggests," said Nack.

"Good guess, brah," Ten said happily. "Good guess indeed. Bods guard hackers during missions. It's a little difficult to crack into a network when you're getting shot at unless you've got somebody between you and them shooting back."

Looking back and forth across the room, Nack thought he could see the subtle differences between the two groups now that he knew what to look for. Here was a woman that moved a little too gracefully to be sitting behind a desk all day. There was a man sorting through a pile of mini-comps, digipads, and sensor paks nearly half a meter deep. One person wearing more weapons than electronics, and another person vice versa.

"Hmm."

"'Hmm' as in 'interesting'?" asked Ten. "Or 'hmm' as in 'I think I already know what I want to be'?"

"'Hmm' as in I think you're right," Nack said, turning his eyes back to Ten. "It depends. Probably on how I do during training today, right?"

Ten grinned and said, "You got it, brah. You're going to get a little bit of actual training today, of course, but most of it is going to be in the form of tests to figure out what you already know."

Nack made a pained face and groaned. "Tests?! Didn't I get enough of those yesterday? I think you guys have poked and prodded me enough for one lifetime . . . "

"Those were just medical, physical, and psychiatric tests, my man. Think of these more like aptitude tests. You're the one that's going to be doing the poking and prodding today, and we're just going to watch and evaluate."

"Yah, alright," Nack acquiesced. "That doesn't sound so bad. Welp," he said, pushing his food tray away from himself, "I'm all finished here. I've got plenty more questions for ya, but I guess we've gotta get this training thing started, huh?"

"Indeed we do, brah," Ten said as they stood up. "And no worries on your questions, there's always time later."

Nack smiled and nodded as he and Ten carried their trays back to the processors. With that bit of business finished, he took a few deep breaths and braced himself for the day ahead.

It was going to be a long one.

END HOMEROOM