COMING AWAKE, JOEL FELT refreshed. He guessed that only a few moments had passed. His body felt normal. The light weight of the headset and the exo frame felt like they should. He didn’t feel any after effects from the cold or the stress.

All around him was nothing but darkness. He couldn’t see walls or a floor, he was in a void. That didn’t bother him. It was a virtu. He had the sense of not being alone but he put it down to nerves.

The motionless quiet began to unsettle him. It was like his mind was trying to alert him to something he couldn’t hear or see. He tried to relax, wondering what more tests he was going to have to endure.

Joel felt his temperature drop. “That was a bit of a workout.” The figure of the old man was morphing like smoke out of the darkness. “The dog train, the snow and the cold water. You feel okay?”

“Sure.” Joel wanted to appear open and unguarded. He had never felt more exposed and at risk, but he needed to learn as much as he could. Smoke drifted and the old man morphed into the Gabriel.

Around them, numbers and lights came on and flickered. Sparked into life above them and below, stretching down farther than Joel could see. And higher up. It spread and faded, seemingly to infinity on all sides.

They were inside a complex, abstracted display. A massive amount of data, structured in layers of rows and columns. A huge, terrifying structure of order. Joel had no way to guess what any of it was. He tried only to observe. Numbers in columns. Formulas. Logical and mathematical expressions. Rules maybe?

It seemed like it could be a massive visualization of the contents of a datacenter. He had no way to guess what the data might be or what it represented. It was numerical, though. Not binary or hex. Not a coded abstractions for a machine to use. Numbers. And currency symbols.

“This is one of USCom’s nodes for currency exchange dealing. Foreign currencies and futures are negotiated and traded. Mostly automatically.”

“Is this a picture of it or is this it?”

“Well, that’s kind of an interesting question.” Joel thought, Is the Gabriel here a picture, or is it the Gabriel, standing next to me in this constructed virtu?

The Gabriel supplied an answer. “It’s both.“

Joel looked harder as the Gabriel went on with his explanation. Joel didn’t expect to understand any of it and he didn’t particularly care. He wasn’t listening. He was playing for time. Trying to recover and to get some sense of what it was that the Gabriel wanted from him.

The Gabriel had the result that he wanted from the ‘process,’ at least the parts that involved the other ‘interns’ or whatever they were. Why did he put the six of them through that sham contest? What was he aiming to get?

Joel figured for sure that he wasn’t there for his expertise on the currency markets. That wouldn’t be any more than his experience at managing or hacking big, super-integrated data systems. Joel was sure that the Gabriel had more experience with all those things than he did.

He was also certain that the Gabriel had put him through the last tasks, maybe all of them, so he could take readings of Joel’s nervous system. The dog sled dash was designed to make Joel hold on hard while he ducked and dodged fast objects and hazards. Testing his reflexes under stress.

Cutting off the feeling in Joel’s limbs and extremities and at the same time making him swim for his life was a way to see how he could push with only determination when his body was exhausted and worn out.

It was like his whole motor nervous system was being mapped. All the paths of instruction from his brain through his body – the signals that operated his limbs and all of his reactions and reflexes. But he could only guess at why.

The Gabriel was talking. “There is more juice in these numbers than you could ever count. More than you would ever guess.” His voice was softer and slower. Close and confidential.

“This,” he gestured to a cell bordered in blue. It was different from the others. A string of numbers at the top looked familiar. At the same instant Joel identified them, the Gabriel said, “This is a port to your mom’s account.”

Joel was conflicted. He knew he shouldn’t be startled by the Gabriel having such intimate information. At the same time he wasn’t surprised. But his reflex was to say what he always said when someone referred to his ‘Mom.’

The Gabriel was ahead of him. “I know,” he said, “I know she’s not your birth mother, Joel. That you aren’t directly related.”

Joel chewed the inside of his lip. It felt like he was being invaded. Like the Gabriel had showed up at his home, acting like he belonged there.

“You can put an amount into the account, Joel. Here,” he pointed to a pair of up and down arrows by the blue cell. “Try it.”

Hesitant, Joel touched the up arrow. As soon as numbers appeared in the cell, the word Deposit lit above it with an ‘OK?’ Button. He held the up arrow. The number span and blurred as it got bigger.

Joel kept his finger on the button as he said, “This is a gag, right? I’m not really going to be able to just drop some huge amount of juice onto Mom’s account.”

Joel heard the mischieous v in the voice. “So suspicious.”

Joel ran the number up to half a billion. He looked at the Gabriel. The Gabriel grinned. Joel pushed the arrow for more. “I can give her any amount, can I?”

The Gabriel shrugged, still grinning.

“This isn’t really going to happen.” Joel said, when the number reached two billion. “Is it?”

The Gabriel’s face didn’t give anything away.

“Will I ever be able to ask her, to find out for sure?”

“It’s unlikely.”

Joel ran the number up to ten billion before he hit the ‘OK?’ button.

“You could ask her, across the supernet,” the glasspaper sarcastic edge was back, “but I could easily fake the communication, so you wouldn’t really know for sure.”

Joel was sure the Gabriel was steering him away from what he’d just told him. He also had a sense that somehow, he could be under surveillance on the inside. Like he suspected his nervous system could have been. To be safe, he wouldn’t think about it until later. Assuming he might get some private time again. Ever.

“Can I send her a note?” Joel asked, switching the subject back. “She could pay for the village’s new kite barrage, fund another one, even. She’d still have enough to be impossibly wealthy.”

“No.” the Gabriel grinned, “No little notes. You’ll have to trust her goodwill to get some community spirit going.”

Joel reached for the cell again. The Gabriel raised a finger and the cell vanished. He guided Joel back to a dense concentration of cells. Most of them were red or orange.

“This is the entrance to the site. All users have to enter their identity and credentials here.” Joel saw boxes asking for usernames, passwords, biometric data. “All except us, of course.”

His grin was razor-sharp. “We can just step around the security.”

He pointed to a cluster of cells in the middle of the mass. “Here are the welcome screens and inputs. See if you can hack your way in. I’d be interested to know if you could do it.”

“I’m not really that kind of a hacker.” He does, Joel thought, He wants to watch my brain or my synapses or whatever while I try to hack a problem. Joel shuddered.

“I think you sell yourself short, Joel.” The voice was low. And very near. “You’ve engineered your way around some fairly tough systems.”

“Not really.”

“Should I name a few indie gaming tournaments?”

“Oh. Well, okay. That’s not really the same thing, though.”

“No?” there was a pause. “You’d hope not, wouldn’t you. It would be nice to think that USCom’s financial centers and trading networks were better protected than some virtus or games. The truth is that games corporations often have way better security than financial institutions and even government systems.”

“Really?”

“Of course. It makes sense when you think that games companies are full of people who love what they do. They stay up through the night tinkering with systems. Persuading hardware to do what it isn’t supposed to. Squeezing extra bandwidth, wrenching a couple of ticks more value out of a processor cycle.” He cocked his head to one side. “Like you do, Joel. Banks and government officers, eh, not so much.”

“Now,” he urged Joel toward the welcome screen. “See how far you can get.”

Joel asked him, “Why did you do that before?”

The Gabriel’s grin was still fixed in place but it had lost its shine.

Joel approached him as he went on, “The thing with the account. I wondered if it might be a prize. But that doesn’t seem like you. I couldn’t see why you would do that. And I wondered if you would be testing me. Would I break the law? Would I do it while you were watching? But I don’t think it’s that. You’d already said enough about the fact that I wouldn’t be caught or punished. So I guess it was just to see what number I would be at when I stopped.”

Standing back, the Gabriel looked at him for a moment. “That’s a big part of it. Probably not for the reason you think, though. But, since you mention it, I was impressed by the number you did pick. Most people would stop a lot lower than that.”

“Oh? How many people have played that game?”

He saw a new kind of a smile on the Gabriel’s face now. Like a fat, purring cat. A satisfied, Cheshire cat grin. “Good, Joel. Good. I have chosen well.” He turned. Then, as he started to leave, he said, “You did give me what I needed, Joel.”

“In what way?”

“You were right, I wanted to watch you solve the gateway security. Or at least try.” Joel’’s breath caught. “But watching you figure out how to keep me distracted while you didn’t do that was just as useful. And even more interesting. So thank you for that.”

“Will my Mom get the juice?”

“She already has it.” then, cocking his head a little to one side, “The choice you put in for your companion was intriguing. If I hadn’t already decided, I think that would have made the choice clear enough. I want to hear you tell me why you gave that name, though.”

“I knew they were the right person. They told me so. In so many words.”

“Really?”

“Yup. The day the drones came to the village, they said they wanted it to be them that the drones had come for.”

“Ty Bannon?”

“It was what he told me that morning. He wished that he were going to be chosen.”

The Gabriel’s head shook and he turned back to face Joel fully. “Giving you that chance with the money, like most of the choices in the process, the selection you made wasn’t what was most interesting to me. I wanted much more to see how you would make the decision. More than to know the choice itself.”

“But with that one, the juice, I also wanted to let you see some of the upside. You may have misgivings about having been through the process and coming out as the…” his eyes narrowed as he paused, “As the chosen.” His eyebrows lifted like he was surprised and pleased by the phrase. “There are benefits.” And he turned away. As he left, he called back over his shoulder,

“You’ll see.”