"Rake!" They kept shouting his name over and over. He had to touch them all on the top of the head, per the ritual. It was like Christ handing out blessings. Only, they were the ones who had blessed him: The Open-Source Coalition. It was they who wrote the software for his chip and designed most of the hardware. Over a million of them at last count, scattered all over the world. He was officially the most unhackable mind on the planet because of their ongoing support. It was a religion, all right, and he was their god. Though he supposed it was a mutual adoration society, as he couldn't get to sleep at nights were it not for these guys. Not that he slept much or they quieted all his qualms of being hacked, just allowed him to push those fears to the back of his mind. 

"I see you guys are still playing with keyboards and joy sticks," he said. 

Monad-he might have been sixteen if he was a day-said, "Yeah, don't know any self-respecting hacker that would actually put a chip in their heads. We know too many ways they can be hacked. We're as old school as they come anymore." 

"What do you do to keep up with the chip-enhanced?" he said. 

"Come, I'll show you." As he followed Monad, the hackers were walking by, the ones who hadn't "touched base" with him yet, patted him on the back or the sides on their return to their stations. Any more hits like that and he'd have to push for the crash dummy upgrade. Monad pointed to the bathing suit caps a lot of them were wearing. "There are neural connections in the cap itself, allowing you to enter hyperspace with your mind without actually frying it. The ones who can't stand how the cap feels use a headband or use an adhesive patch on their forehead or a shaved skull to provide the telepathic link to the supercomputers who carry out most of the heavy lifting." 

Monad collapsed into his chair at his station. "So what brings you to the hive?" 

"Why do you call it the hive?" 

"If something's trending that requires the attention on more than one of us, we can telepathically communicate with one another using the same interfaces and go to work on different aspects of the problem simultaneously." 

Rake took a deep breath and let it out to help him flush out all the neurotoxins from his system, the ones created by all the stress Monad was generating in him. He didn't need any more sleepless nights. "I'm here because I just had two high-security chip-heads lose it on me, one a bus driver, the other a semi-retired military guy they only called in from time to time. Neither chip model has ever recorded a failure." 

"Yeah, duh. Those kind of current events you hardly need to bring us up to speed on." 

"Maybe you could bring me up to speed." 

Monad ran both hands through his hair real fast and then let out a groan. "You're not going to like this. We're behind those two going AWOL. And that's just the beginning. There's an all-out war going on right now between the open-source guys and the private chip contractors who still support proprietary tech. We're going after DARPA really hard to show that even military tech needs to be open-sourced. That way no one has an edge on anybody. Removes any temptation for war. They don't exactly see it that way, but that's proprietary thinking for you. As to the school bus guy, we wanted to make it clear no one is safe anymore who isn't running open source software and hardware." 

"So you're both hacking and counter-hacking one another's chips until one side concedes defeat?" 

"That's about the size of it." 

Rake shook his head. "I can't believe I didn't see this coming. It's my job to see these conspiracies before they unfold."  

"Don't go so hard on yourself, dude. We'll update you to nexgen paranoid levels as soon as we can. Only we're a bit preoccupied right now." 

"Who's winning this war, out of curiosity?" 

"We are, of course, on the chip programming end anyway. So far their best weapon is just to off us. They eliminate what they can't buy off or outcompete. It's their way." 

"You don't sound too concerned." 

Monad laughed. "Most of their men in black are running proprietary chip software. If they were running open sourced, I'd be more concerned. Still, we've heightened security around here." 

"You have security? Where? This place looks more open for business than Wal-Mart." 

"If you knew, I'd have to kill you." 

"Just for the record," Rake said, "fifty-six kids died in that bus accident. And not one of them had an upgrade. I'd feel better if one of you transistor heads would feel disconsolate about that." 

"Yeah, that sucks," Monad said. "War, man. What can I tell you?" 

"Did you start it, or are you trying to end it?" 

"Oh, we started it, all right. We track the chip-enhanced going postal world-wide. The shifting patterns were hard to pick out from the random noise. Over the course of a year you can expect .002 percent chip failure, and less than ten percent of those will be particularly dramatic in the way you saw today. If the rate drops to .001 or climbs to .005 or more, so long as it doesn't last long and there's no discernible pattern, it doesn't mean anything. One of our top numbers guys, an Asperger's kid found patterns in the noise he felt were significant. When we looked into who went AWOL and why, we didn't like what we saw." 

"And what was that?" 

"The dramatic incidents were all like the ones today, all media-worthy. And they were all open-sourced chips." 

"I thought you guys pride yourself on unhackability." 

"That's true. The internet runs on our chips for a reason. We're the most reliable chips out there. But nothing's truly unhackable. When you have a million plus proof readers checking code, fewer things slip through the cracks. But there are still cracks." 

"And you thought the likelihood of all those dramatic incidents falling on open-source chip-heads was just a little too coincidental." 

"No getting anything past you, Rake." 

"Well, here's one that might have gotten past you. I don't think the other side fired the first salvo just to start a war with you. I think this war is a cover up for a larger conspiracy." 

"Yes! This is why you have to come by more often, Rake. This is why you're our god." 

"You're aware of Digital Nirvana going live today in China?" 

"Of course." 

"I believe, in an effort to shave margins, they're pressuring people to upload themselves to digital nirvana. And they're doing so by clamping down on the demand for chipheads, now that they're increasingly dangerous and unpredictable. That just leaves one way out for anyone who can't cope with reality anymore, and God knows the chip-enhanced can barely afford access, and that's to upload." 

"So anyone left behind gets to enjoy a better quality of lifestyle for less money. Ashamed I didn't think of it. But how do you entice those who still refuse to upload to digital nirvana to make room for the 'quality-of-lifers'?" 

"You didn't check the small print over there at Digital Nirvana?" 

"Ah, sorry, we've kind of got a war to fight. Not really our thing, anyway. I mean sounds good on the surface, more virtual reality for everybody, any number of body doubles so you can live numerous lives in parallel, more so with each chip upgrade... but most of us would rather be gods in this domain than pawns in someone else's. And if we don't like chips in our heads, how do you think we feel about being totally inside a mind built by someone else, especially some uber-mind with quantum degrees of power more than any of us has? No sirree, we'll be the last people on Earth. Not the chip heads, and not the unupgraded humans who don't speak in computer codes." 

"You may not have any choice. I believe the real war is just beginning. And as they turn up the heat, we'll see more drought and weather driven famines, more plagues, more flu pandemics, anyway they can think of wiping people out and making it seem as if it's all just related to global warming or..." 

"You have the most beautiful mind, I swear to God. You're going to need us to prove that. It's damn hard to isolate patterns in all the noise of natural disasters these days, and man-made ones for that matter." 

"Why do you think I'm here?" 

"Ah, tracking with you finally. Excellent. Anything else I'd say we couldn't spare the manpower. But something tells me, I won't have any trouble getting volunteers for this." 

"You realize, win or lose this war, you're falling right into their hands, right?" 

"Yeah, I guess so. Bummer." 

"Why don't you change your game up a little bit? Why don't you use the very tools they're using to wage weather wars and plague wars and flu pandemic wars against them? Why don't you apply supercomputing time and superior logistics algorithms and garage biolabs in such a way that even their best people can't tell the tide's shifting in your favor?" 

Monad nodded his head and kept it bobbing up and down. "Nice. You're a hell of a military strategist, Rake. That's right!" he said, flicking his fingers. "I forget, you were a three star military general once. How cool is that? Total republican. We don't meet many of those on this side of the fence." 

"You understand, before you go trying to shift the tide of this war you want to prove it's actually going on first and it's not just my paranoid ideation carrying me away?" 

"Yeah, sure. Like I said, I'll put my best numbers people on it. Have several savants here that live for this shit." 

Rake stood. "Keep me posted, kid. Can't make much progress without you. Hell, you know me, I think everything's proof of a conspiracy. You'd laugh if I told you how all this got started." 

"Yeah, that Doc Holiday is running some pretty good anti-paranoia software through her brain, huh? All natural, too. Of all the girlfriends to pick, Rake..." 

"I swear the next person to comment on my alleged love life is going flying out the window, even if I have to purchase another chip to make it happen." 

Monad didn't really hear him. He'd was responding to a hive-mind flare up generated by God knows what. Rake decided to use the opportunity to flee the building without being mobbed on the way out the door as he was on the way in. That way, maybe he wouldn't have to see a chiropractor before heading home.