How I got here in the end, part twelve: the end of the beginning

The cyberpunk lifestyle reads a whole lot better in fiction than as a lifestyle manifesto. Take it from someone who's lived through it.

Picture this: you're a former drug dealer who has turned to hacking for a living. You're crashing in an apartment a bit older than Texas, surrounded by about seventeen computers, sleeping on a futon with a girlfriend with metre-long purple dreadlocks, and planning your defection from one net-based futuristic corporation to another over Korean take-away food. It s