HAWK HAD TRAPPED the roach under an eight-ounce drinking glass upended on top of the worktable he used as a desk in his room at home. The roach was a Blatta orientalis, the oriental cockroach, about an inch long and shiny black, commonly found in all the swank houses of Palo Alto.

  But although this bug was common, he was special to Hawk.

  “You’re doing very well, Macho,” Hawk said to the roach. “It’s not much of a bug’s life, I have to admit, but you’re worthy of the challenge.”

  Behind Hawk, Pidge lay on Hawk’s bed reading background material on an upcoming class project: a three-dimensional fax, something that had probably been inspired by the “beam me up, Scotty” technology from Star Trek and was now becoming manifest in the real world.

  How it worked was, a machine scanned an object at point A, and an identical object was created by a laser carving out a replica from another material at point Z. But Pidge knew all of this. He’d seen the demo. So what he was doing was busywork while he waited for Hawk to get his lazy ass in gear.

  “You’re behind on the dialogue,” Pidge grumbled. “Instead of talking to that bug, you should do the dialogue before your stupid parents come home.”

  “Why don&rs............