"Hey Frank," I greeted the owner of the little computer store as I walked in through the door. "Anything new?"

  I had no idea how the guy stayed in business. His shop was always kind of cramped and messy, the front counter doubled as his work bench and there were usually a half dozen partially-assembled towers or disassembled ptops spread out obscuring the actual products he was supposedly selling.

  And none of those products seemed any newer than about five years old. In fact some were a whole lot older than that. Like he even had fading ads for Windows 7 in the front window.

  It wasn't exactly a great location either, his shop was in the middle of a strip mall at the end of a residential street. There was a pizza joint at one end and a convenience store at the other. Frank's little computer business was stuck between a dry cleaners and a pce that sold adult novelties and videos.

  At least half his business came from folks in the neighbourhood, computer-illiterate adults and grandparents and people like that. They'd get their machines so full of viruses and malware they'd barely function, then haul them down to Frank's to get them fixed up.

  I knew that because I had an occasional part-time job doing that for him. He paid me cash under the table, and the work was way better than slinging fries or pushing a broom or whatever menial crap other college freshmen did to cover their tuition. And it was less illegal than my other option, which was basically just hacking and computer crime.

  That probably would have earned me more money, but I was hoping to get a legit dev job someday. And that meant getting the college degree, without getting arrested first. So I mostly avoided breaking any ws, and dropped by at Frank's pce every day after css to see if he had any work for me.

  "Hey kid!" Frank smiled at me. "Yeah actually, I was going through a box of old ptops and I found something right up your alley."

  For some reason he never called me by name, which left me wondering sometimes if he even remembered what it was. I wasn't going to compin though, I kind of hated my stupid name. Not that I particurly liked being called a kid, but it was better than the other name.

  And dealing with old ptops was another aspect of my part-time job. He sold used gear, and I helped refurbish the stuff when it came in.

  I had a feeling it was one of those 'he knows a guy who knows a guy' sort of arrangements. The equipment was usually a couple years old, probably stuff that came off lease. Like big companies upgrading their employee's workstations or something. So Frank would get four or five dozen nearly-identical ptops in all at once, and I'd go through them one by one. I'd clean the cases, repair or repce any damaged parts, and wipe the drives. Then I'd do a fresh OS install so he could resell them as refurbs. That's how I scored a pretty decent ptop for myself st year, he gave me a discount since it was one of the units I worked on.

  "Oh yeah?" I asked him. "Does that mean you have some work for me? Or do you mean you found some old piece of junk you're going to try and pawn off on me?"

  He knew I had a weakness for old, rare, or unusual gear. I didn't collect it as such, but I liked to take it apart or figure out how it worked. I'd find some way to soup it up or make it do stuff the manufacturers never intended. Then I'd get bored with it and sell it online, usually for a profit.

  Frank had tempted me with various bits of old hardware over the past year, and usually it was a fair deal. Once or twice though I'd let myself get drawn in by something strange or interesting, only to realize ter I'd traded a day's pay for a paperweight.

  He gave me a wide smile then ducked down behind the counter. A moment ter he straightened up and set something down ontop of a partially-assembled mini-tower.

  "Feast your eyes on this!" he announced as if he was unveiling the crown jewels.

  It was a ptop. A tiny ptop. The exterior was white and pink pstic, and I couldn't see a brand-name on it anywhere.

  Frank lifted the lid up to show off the small-ish screen and the tiny white chiclet-style keyboard. The keys were interesting, along with the usual letters and numbers they had a second set of symbols screened on them. I didn't recognize the nguage, but I wasn't exactly an expert on that sort of thing. If I had to guess I'd say they looked vaguely Russian, but for all I knew they could have been from anywhere.

  Just below the space-bar was a small trackpad and a pair of mouse buttons, and to the right of that was a little rectangur indent with a pstic window in it. I realized after a moment it was a fingerprint scanner. Under that in the lower right corner were four unlit status LEDs, and at the upper right corner above the keyboard was the power button. Speaking of power the ptop came with a small white wall-wart, and the battery pack was obviously removable since it was visible at the back of the machine.

  I tried not to look too interested as I picked the thing up for a closer look, but Frank probably knew I was already hooked.

  The small ptop weighed less than a kilo, and with the lid closed its size was about twenty-two centimetres wide by seventeen deep, and only about two and a half centimetres thick. The screen was a little over twenty centimetres diagonal, and it was a wide aspect ratio. The chiclet keys were all clean and seemed to be in good shape, none of them were mushy or loose.

  There were a couple USB ports and a card reader on one side, and what looked like a mini HDMI port on the other side next to some ventition slots. The charging cable plugged in at the back next to the battery, and on the bottom was what appeared to be a recessed docking port. There were also a couple screw holes, but that was it. No manufacturer's bels, no serial number, and no access panel to get at the memory or storage.

  Overall the little ptop seemed to be in good condition. None of the ports looked damaged, there was no sign of wear, and the pstic was clean without any hint of yellowing.

  After inspecting it for a few moments I hit the power button, but nothing happened. I frowned, "It doesn't work?"

  "Battery's dead," Frank replied. "It just needs to be charged up. I had it on earlier, it got as far as a log-in prompt before it died."

  He shrugged, "It's not Windows so I don't know what to do with it, And I doubt any of my regur customers would want something that small. So I figured you might like it."

  I thought for a few seconds as I continued staring at it. If I had to guess, it was probably a netbook. I'd never seen one in person before but I knew they used to be a thing years ago. The ck of branding was weird though. I figured it could be a prototype, which would mean it was rare and possibly valuable.

  On the other hand the weird symbols on the keyboard and ck of branding might have pointed to it being a movie prop, but if it actually powered up that wasn't so likely. Another possibility was it was somebody's home-brew project. Or a franken-ptop. That was becoming more of a thing nowadays, people would gut older machines and repce the insides with something cheap and modern like a raspberry pi.

  "So how much do you want for it?" I finally asked.

  Frank replied right away, "Fifty bucks and it's yours."

  I knew if he was asking fifty that meant he didn't think it was worth half that. So we haggled a bit, and I talked him down to twenty-five dolrs and a promise to bring him coffee next time I came in.

  It was an ok deal as far as I was concerned. It wasn't a lot of money, and at the very worst I'd just strip the thing for parts and find out how it worked. My twenty-five dolrs would at least give me an evening's entertainment, and maybe I'd even learn something.

  That was all Frank had for me, there was no work and nothing else going on. So I stuffed the little computer and its wall wart into my backpack, then headed out the door.

  As I left I told him, "See you ter Frank, have a good weekend."

  "Have fun kid," he smiled.

  It was only about a twenty minute walk home from the store, but normally I'd drag it out to twice that. This time I was kind of eager to have a look at my newest acquisition, so I just headed straight for the house.

  When I got there I found Chelsea's car in the driveway, so I went around and let myself in through the side door. Then I headed straight down to the basement as quietly as possible, so she wouldn't know I was home. Luckily I didn't have to worry about Edward. He wouldn't be back from his business trip for another week.

  That was the other reason I liked hanging around Frank's shop, it was quieter and safer than home.

  Ever since mom died five years ago my life pretty much sucked. I never knew my bio dad, and the guy mom moved in with when I was nine was always an asshole to me. After mom passed away that just got a whole lot worse. Chelsea, his daughter from a previous marriage, was four years older than me and she tormented and bullied me whenever she got the chance.

  Honestly I had no idea why they still let me live there. I was positive Ed was going to kick me out the day I turned eighteen, but for some reason that never happened. I wasn't going to ask though, I didn't want to put any ideas in the guy's head.

  I kept to myself anyways, so they didn't have to see me unless they went out of their way to find me. My bedroom was a small windowless room in a corner of the basement, and once I was down there I could rex a little. I'd still keep quiet just in case, but Chelsea and her dad rarely came down there unless they wanted to yell at me for some reason.

  There wasn't much in the way of furniture, I had an old folding table that doubled as my desk, half-buried under books and junk. The cheap folding chair next to the table was under a pile of undry, some dirty and some clean. My bed was basically just a box-spring and mattress pced directly on the cold cement floor.

  I sat on my bed and pulled the little computer out of my backpack, then plugged the wall-wart into a power bar by my feet. Finally I plugged the charger into the back of the ptop, and one of those status LEDs came on with an amber glow. I figured that meant the battery was charging.

  Without waiting I pressed the power button, and another LED lit up green. A moment ter the screen came to life, and a bunch of OS boot text started scrolling past. I found it odd that there was no BIOS spsh screen first, but I figured maybe that was disabled for a fast boot-up.

  And it did boot quick, less than five seconds to reach a log-in prompt. Between that and the ck of any hard drive noises I knew it had to be running on a solid state drive, and if it was a decent size then that alone was worth the money I paid for it.

  The system was still in text mode, just white letters in the top-left corner of a bck screen. I figured the GUI would probably load after the user logged in. Another odd thing was the prompt didn't ask for a user ID, and there was no response when I tapped on the keyboard. Instead I noticed a faint green light slowly blinking from the fingerprint scanner window.

  I tried swiping my right thumb along the scanner just to see what would happen. There were three quick bright red blinks then it went back to the slow dull green blink. The screen didn't change, but it was pretty obvious that my thumb was not recognized. No surprises there.

  With the keyboard disabled there wasn't much more I could do just yet. One possibility was to boot it off a Live-USB drive, then see what I could find from there. Or if that didn't work, I'd have to take the thing apart and pull out the drive. Then I could plug it into an adaptor and maybe read it from my other ptop.

  On a whim I swiped my right forefinger on the fingerprint scanner, and got another three red blinks. Then I gave it the middle finger, as in I made a rude gesture at the little computer then swiped my middle finger over the reader.

  There were three quick bright green blinks and the log-in prompt was repced by a command line interface. The stupid thing false-positive'd on my middle finger, and logged me in as if I was the former owner. And once I was in, the keyboard worked just fine.

  "Holy shit," I ughed. "Crap fingerprint scanner."

  I found myself in the home directory of a user named Lisa. It seemed like the previous owner of this thing was a girl, as if the pink and white case colours weren't enough of a clue.

  I tried all the commands I knew to get a graphical interface but none of them worked, so I had to conclude that there probably wasn't a GUI installed. Or if there was it was something obscure enough I'd never heard of it. So I moved on to see what I had to work with.

  After a few minutes I had to admit that the OS was just as weird as everything else about this little computer. It seemed vaguely unix-like, but customized beyond any recognition. I couldn't even find a way to identify the hardware, like what processor it was running or how much memory or storage it had. About the only thing I could say for sure was it definitely wasn't a franken-pi, and it sure wasn't some decade-old netbook either.

  Since I couldn't get anywhere with the OS or the hardware, the only thing left was to poke around at the software and data.

  The home directory of the previous owner didn't have much in it, but a 'Work' directory caught my eye. I had a look in there and found a whole slew of programs that gave me some clue as to what sort of person the previous owner was, or what they were up to.

  It put a grin on my face as I said to myself, "Looks like Lisa was some kind of game developer. This should be fun."

  PurpleCatGirl