Evasion

by Mark Leslie

  Scott respected that, and the man. Though he worked freelance, Herb Canter was the type of boss Scott could see himself working for full time. He kept just enough distance to allow people to get their jobs done, and seemed to have the special knack for stepping in to assist and support at just the right time.

  So when Scott pushed Herb’s office door opened to find the man sitting at his desk, a small black pistol pointed at Scott’s head, he was more than a little surprised.

  “Herb, what’s going on?” Scott said, starting down the muzzle of the weapon.

  “Step inside and close the door,” Herb said.

  “I don’t --”

  “Close the door!” Herb repeated.

  Scott noticed that the man’s eyes had a unique glazed quality. His eyes were focused and intelligent, just like they had always been, but there was an additional layer of something almost indistinguishable masking his face; something Scott could only think of as a slightly glazed look – almost as if Herb were looking at Scott through an additional think gauze or filter.

  “Okay,” Scott said, turning to close the door. “Just give me a second here…”

  A small hole punching into the drywall beside Scott’s head startled him; a split second later a sound like a metal ruler slapped down hard onto his desk filled the room. Scott ducked down to the floor, realizing Herb had taken a shot at his head and missed by a mere inch or two.

  “Herb? What the fuck?” Scott yelled, scrambling on the floor and out the doorway. Out of the corner of his eye he spotted the black handgun with the incredibly long pistol barrel – a silencer? – in Herb’s hand.

  “You won’t get away!” Herb yelled after him in a deep monotone voice. “You cannot evade us!”

  Scott crab-crawled around the corner of the office entrance before getting to his feet and sprinting toward the exit, his backpack still atop of his left shoulder. Ahead, he spotted one of the company’s security guards walking quickly from the fourth floor stairwell entrance, his eyes fixed on Scott.

  “Hurry!” Scott yelled, pointing over his shoulder. “I don’t know what’s going on, but Herb has a gun and he’s shooting!”

  The guard didn’t say anything, but his eyes remained locked on Scott.

  Even from thirty feet away, there was something eerily familiar about the glassy-eyed glaze in the man’s eyes as he reached to his belt to draw a weapon.

  “Oh shit,” Scott said, stopping in his tracks.

  Scott knew that Digi-Life security guards didn’t carry firearms, but they did carry mag lites, and at least one of them had Tasers. He wasn’t sure what this one was carrying, but, even if he couldn’t clearly read the intent in the man’s glazed eyes, it came through quite distinctly in his words.

  “You won’t get away!” The guard said, in the same monotone voice Herb had previously used. “You cannot evade us!”

  Chapter Two

  Four-and-a-half Years Ago

  Scotty spent most of the morning that his father died with his nose buried in a book.

  The rest of the time, he had mostly been anxious about an appointment that had been scheduled.

  He had, of course, driven to Parry Sound to spend the previous day with his parents and be there in the wee morning hours to drive them up in to the city for Lionel Desmond’s early morning surgery, but, at the time he had felt as if he were a mere assistant to the whole procedure.

  Sure, the surgery had been a serious one – the removal of a kidney with a potentially malignant cyst on it – but explained by the doctors as routine enough that Lionel Desmond might perhaps be going in for a tonsillectomy rather than a nephrectomy.

  It wasn’t quite day surgery, but it was one in which the man would, after being observed overnight in hospital, be allowed to return home the next day.

  So, the dutiful son – although he had, at first been reluctant to play that role – Scotty took the trek north from Toronto to his parent’s home. At least, he told himself he was a dutiful son; and his parents fully believed he was being a dutiful son.

  What he didn’t tell them was that, conveniently, he had hooked up with a potential client online; and, though Scotty was there to play the role of helpful and dutiful son, it had been the lucrative nature of meeting with the client and taking on a new job that had appealed to him most.

  Sure, he loved his father; but this was a potential huge cash windfall that he simply couldn’t ignore.

  Scotty was a seasoned and sought-after hacker.

  He had been adept with computers since the very first day that his father brought the computer home from the high school where he worked. It had been a Commodore Pet Computer, among the first “home computers” to be wide distributed and used in various mid-northern high schools across the province.

  Scotty had relished in seeing that a simple series of words written in a particular order in a certain format – in this case, the programming language being BASIC with each line of code, a logical statement telling the computer an action to perform denoted in numeral order – you could get this machine to do things.

  The first program that had sparked Scotty’s imagination was when the teacher had instructed them how to have the computer flash the word “HELLO” to them over and over.

  10 PRINT “HELLO!”

  20 PAUSE 1

  30 CLS

  40 PAUSE 1

  50 GOTO 10

  When you ran the program, it would display the characters “HELLO!” on an otherwise blank screen – a series of green letters on a black screen – then a timer would count out exactly one second, then clear the screen, count out another second, then return to the first line of the program and repeat the process. The result, a flashing “HELLO!” of green letters in the top left hand corner of the otherwise blank black computer screen

  The original instructions had been to just type in “HELLO!” but Scotty had figured out he could insert virtually any characters in there, so immediately changed that to “HELLO SCOTTY!”

  As his classmates were fooling around with just getting that simple five lines of code to work, Scotty found himself immediately bored and tried to use the basic understanding to create something a little bit more complex.

  So he modified it to the following:

  10 PRINT “HELLO SCOTTY!”

  20 PAUSE 3

  30 CLS

  40 PRINT “HAVE A GREAT DAY . . .”

  50 PAUSE 1

  60 CLS

  70 PRINT “. . . BUTTHEAD!”

  80 PAUSE 5

  90 CLS

  100 PAUSE 2

  110 GOTO 10

  This particular program printed “HELLO SCOTTY!” then cleared the screen, then the words “HAVE A GREAT DAY . . .” appeared, then the screen cleared again, then “. . . BUTTHEAD!” appeared, before the routine would repeat.

  It had, essentially, been Scotty’s first “hack” – taking an existing program, understanding how it worked and then manipulating it to do something that he wanted, rather than the original intention of the teacher!

  And, of course, being satisfied with the result, but wanting to experiment with what else he could do, he tweaked the code to remove the final “clear screen” prompt – he changed the program to the following:

  10 PRINT “HELLO SCOTTY!”

  20 PAUSE 2

  30 CLS

  40 PRINT “HAVE A GREAT DAY . . .”

  50 PAUSE 2

  60 CLS

  70 PRINT “. . . BUTTHEAD!”

  100 PAUSE 5

  110 GOTO 70

  By removing lines eighty and ninety he had learned that the code was numeral in nature and didn’t need to follow a particular pattern – he could skip or insert numbers – so long as they were in numerical order they worked fine. This meant he could insert nine statements between any of the existing lines.

  He also determined that by clearing the final “clear screen message” and not returning back to the original first line, he could alter the manner by which the program worked.
By returning the statement that allowed him to print “. . . BUTTHEAD!” on the screen repeatedly, the program ran through the original statement, the second one, and then the punch line, which repeated.

  It was a rudimentary hack of the original program being taught, but it kept Scotty enthusiastic about what else could be done.

  “Cool!” the student beside Scotty had said when he saw Scotty running the program beside him.

  A few other students at the desk beside him looked and started laughing, asking him to break the program and repeat it again.

  Then the teacher, Mr. Prescott, came over – and this had likely been the determining factor that meant embracing computer programming or forgetting about it as one of the simple experiments children do when learning something new in school.

  Mr. Prescott had originally frowned, in that manner that teachers had to frown upon witnessing students behaving out of the expected order of things – but then a wry grin crossed his face and he stood there nodding, his red hair and red beard bobbing and swaying slightly behind the movements of his head.

  “I see you have grasped the rudimentary elements of BASIC, Mister Desmond,” Mr. Prescott said.

  “Yes, sir,” Scotty said, looking down at his desk, unable to meet the teacher’s eyes.

  “That’s not what I had instructed you to do, is it?”

  “No, sir,”

  “When the bell rings for lunch, you will stay here and help me tidy the computer lab for my afternoon class.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Scotty sighed a bit of relief. He hadn’t been sent to the principal’s office; nor had this landed him detention. Cleaning the lab for a few minutes after everyone else had been dismissed was a relatively easy punishment.

  So when the bell did ring fifteen minutes later and Scotty stayed behind, he learned he wasn’t being held back for punishment, but rather, for extra work. Interesting work.

  “You’re pretty adept at using the computer,” Mr. Prescott said to him just a second after the last student left the class, casting a weary glance back at Scotty as she walked out. The teacher’s elbows were on the table and he had tented his hands together, stroking the underside of his red beard with his two intertwined index fingers.

  “Yes, sir,”

  “The program you wrote was juvenile in nature.”

  “Yes, sir,”

  “But you can do better,” Prescott said, putting his hands down on the desk and pushing himself up to his feet, an intriguing glimmering spark in his eyes. “Much better! You have an undeniable talent, and I think it would be worth your time to continue to explore this, to work at it. Are you willing to work at it? Are you willing to work hard at learning more?”

  Scotty was confused. Mr. Prescott seemed excited. He had been expecting him to ask if he was willing to be better, not act in a juvenile fashion.

  “Uh, yes, sir!”

  “Excellent! Computers are going to be an integral part of our future, Mister Desmond. If you embrace them now, learn all you can, the world will be yours!”

  Scotty and Mr. Prescott never left the computer lab for the entire lunch period – Prescott walked him through even more programming language options, complex routines, taught him additional commands and programs and, by the end of the day, Scotty was marveling at how easy it was to create stick figure animations on the screen.

  The next day, Mr. Prescott taught him more about the wonder of what he could do using BASIC programming language. He took the boy under his wing and showed him the amazing possibilities that lay before him. By the end of the month, after a series of ongoing personalized tutorial sessions at least every second day, Scotty’s skill at programming in BASIC ended up surpassing his mentor’s own ability. Scotty started teaching his master new tricks, new options.

  “You’ve got a real gift for this,” Mr. Prescott bemused one late afternoon when they had been working together in the computer lab after school. Despite the fact Scotty had moved well beyond his mentor’s skill level, he still fed off of the encouragement, praise and guidance the middle-aged man provided. And Prescott’s unwavering belief in Scotty, his willingness to push him harder, to help him achieve higher levels of skill, helped feed Scotty’s confidence, his self-worth – all at a time when that was one of the most important things to develop in a young teenager’s mind and heart.

  “Thank you,” Scotty said in return, a proud smile erupting onto his face.

  “No, my young friend,” Prescott replied. “Thank YOU!”

  And that ongoing relationship, of course, led to Scotty’s real passion. When the Commodore Pet was replaced by the Commodore 128, and, simultaneously, when Scotty’s parents purchased the Commodore VIC-20 for the home, he continued to practice his BASIC programming skills; then moved on to PASCAL. He watched the television show Bits and Bytes featuring Billy Van and Luba Goy, knowing virtually as much as the show’s host (Van) and his computer-connected mentor (Goy), but still marveling at the wonder of computers.

  Prescott also introduced him to various computer magazines, such as Computer & Video Games and Compute! and Scotty reveled in the monthly columns and articles by programmers sharing their programs, which would be typed out in long form for avid readers of the magazine to key into their own computers to try out on their own. Scotty, of course, tried them all, and often experimented with adapting their codes into his own. He even submitted a few of his own adapted codes to the magazine after some encouragement from Mr. Prescott.

  Which led to Scotty actually writing a monthly column for Computer Programmers Monthly, one of the many magazines Scotty ended up subscribing to. Scotty used a pen name for these articles, and Mr. Prescott submitted them on his behalf.

  Scotty wrote these articles under the name Commandor (a word that combined Commander and Commadore) Mr. Prescott handled all of the submission of material, including cashing the checks and ensuring Scotty received his payment. Scotty kept this alter ego to himself – or between his mentor and himself – it was almost like a superhero secret identity. Scotty quite liked the idea of having an ability, a “super power” so to speak, that nobody else knew about. Mr. Prescott was like Scott’s own personal superhero buddy, mentor and support system, a combination of Mister Miyagi from the Karate Kid movies and Alfred, Batman’s personal servant.

  Throughout the years, even when he moved off to University and seldom saw Mr. Prescott – who retired the same year Scotty graduated from university – the secret identity was something only the two of them shared.

  That had been the start of Scotty’s pseudonym, or what became his hacker name. The magazine only lasted about four years before being replaced, but there had been enough of an underground community of hackers, and, as bulletin board systems, the precursors to the internet, came on the scene in mid-to-late 1980s and early 1990s, Scotty found a whole new group of anonymous colleagues who were part of the hacker scene.

  As the bulletin boards eventually gave way to the Freenets and other online communities that became the Internet and World-Wide Web, Scotty, as Commandor became a well-known hacker.

  Though he maintained a regular career as a talented computer programmer, Scotty kept up his secret hacker identity. Which eventually led to the hacker lifestyle, which led to lucrative jobs, and being able to choose which of the many opportunities that were offered to him, such as the one that drew him to Sudbury.

  After years of working in IT, Scotty had a sideline of business in which he would work on various hacks, both personal and professional; the demand for his skills became so huge that he had at first dropped down to part time and took on some tasks. But after a while, the workload was so demanding and the money he was able to make so lucrative, that he ended up creating a business around it.

  Calling his computer services GEEK SUPPORT SERVICES (or GEEKSS) for short, he issued invoices for various innocuous tasks such as network maintenance, computerized consulting, and viral protection software (Yes, he had even developed a popular virus protection and
firewall program that he distributed a freemium version of, but which had advanced capabilities for a low monthly fee); half of the time, the invoice stated service X, but they really got service Y, which was some sophisticated hack, and the money issued to him was far higher than the minor amount that appeared on the official invoice.

  So, in the guise of offering a GEEKSS service, Scotty had come up to Sudbury to meet with a client, but was able to perform the “dutiful son” role as well. He hadn’t often been able to combine his personal work-life preferences with a family duty, and so relished the opportunity.

  But, as the morning dragged on, and the hospital staff kept popping in to advise them that the surgeon who was scheduled to see Scotty’s father had been delayed, yet again, with complications in the earlier scheduled surgery, Scotty became anxious.

  He father, ever the jester, had joked about the delay.

  “Maybe,” he said, leaning over to where Scotty had his nose buried in Cuckoo’s Egg by Clifford Stoll, and indicated with a sideways jab of his thumb an older gentleman who had been sleeping quite undisturbed for the past hour despite the hub-bub of the waiting area filled with no less than a dozen patients and their families “I’ll slip my identification wrist bracelet onto that old fart and slip out of here, pop down to the lake and throw a line into the water. Might as well see if I can pull a trout or two out of the lake while I’m waiting.”

  Scotty smiled at his father. It had always been about the fishing, hadn’t it?

  “Go ahead,” Scotty had grinned. “I’ll create a distraction across the room while you make the switch and slip out.”

  The two men laughed, but Janelle Desmond, Scotty’s mother and Lionel’s wife, just shook her head at them before returning her attention to the paperback romance novel she had brought.

  Scotty thought about that. Both he and his mother had brought a book to keep themselves occupied while waiting.

  But not his father.

  Nope. Lionel Desmond could easily just sit there, content to be consumed by whatever he reflected on while he sat there stoically observing all of the other people in that hospital waiting room. And he had always been like that for as long as Scotty could remember. It didn’t matter where, it didn’t matter when, Lionel Desmond would either sit like a statue or seem to take in the surroundings entirely, or he would, on occasion, connect with those around him, often injecting his trademark brand of humor into a situation, putting others around him at ease.