Hackers

by Jack Dann

  It was the heaviest fantasy trip going, until the Federal anti-hacking laws went into effect. Then it turned into something a little too heavy. Anyway the social dynamic had shifted, as another crop of adolescents discovered its own strange pleasures.

  But for some the pirate life remained a lifelong obsession. Captain Crunch III, Blind Lemon—also known as The Whistling Kid—and Rolly the Deuce were among the perfect masters, silicon sensei, masters of solid-state zen.

  Now I was looking for Rolly the Deuce, my one-time personal master, who had taught me some of the more arcane tricks and stood by when I tested them by accessing the FBI's Most Secret files. "Good work," he told me then, "but you won't stay with it." And he was right. By the time I went to college, I was pretty much out of it. I lacked the pure lunar drive that powered the great bandits.

  We hadn't exactly stayed in touch. Rolly communicated in his own ways. A few Christmas Eves at the last stroke of midnight, the computer played "Jingle Bell Rock," and once, when Carol and I were printing out some stock figures from the Dow Jones, we got a page blank except for the message, "You're under arrest—violation of the International Meep Statutes. Glad to see you're in the money, but your bank's got lousy security. Love, Rolly."

  Anyway, Jesse Woods, who had stayed in touch with Rolly, was playing speed chess with a well-dressed young guy, might have been a chump, might have been a pupil. There was a beep as the kid's hand punched the chrome button on top of his clock, an almost simultaneous beep as Jesse punched his. "Shit," the kid said, and he was almost out of his chair with tension, searching the board for a move as his right hand hovered over it, the same one he'd have to punch the clock with.

  Beep beep beep beep and a bright red light flashed on the kid's clock. The kid slumped in his chair, then said, "I almost had an attack going," and he began setting up pieces. "Can we do it again?"

  "No," Jesse said. "I've got a friend waiting."

  Dull red snakes of hair dirty like the rest of him, fingernail on the littler finger of his left hand curving into a spiral, nose beaked and thin enough to he from a party kit—Jesse was as usual a paragon of bizarre appearance, a sight to scare prospective parents with.

  I said, "You seen Rolly?"

  "A little man. He's fucked up these days, you know?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "Sort of, I don't know, left behind."

  "That's all right, Jesse. I need to see him. Where can I call?"

  "Nobody's got any of his numbers. He's hiding out, I guess you'd call it. Thinks the FBI is on his case."

  "Are they?"

  "What do you think, man? That shit's all yesterday's paper."

  "So how do I find him?"

  "He's in Oakland—" And he gave me directions.

  "Good. Look, Jesse, you want to make some quick cash? I need a few things picked up from home, and I can't do it myself."

  I had agreed to meet Jesse at Cody's Books on Telegraph Avenue. He loved the idea of an anonymous transfer of the plastic sheath of mini-CDs and the book-thick SenTrax Tele that he had picked up for me at home. Jesse stuck his bundle into one of the wooden slots at the front of the bookstore, and I picked it up a few minutes later.

  I walked out of Cody's figuring I had some time to kill. There was no point in trying to get Rolly the Deuce until after dark, not if I wanted him functioning at peak form. He'd have been up all night, ghost dancing in the wires. So I walked toward the campus and along the Avenue, where the sidewalks were crowded with tourists and the multitude of street sellers hustling them.

  I stopped at an All-Bank Booth to pull all my and Carol's liquid funds. I didn't know what was likely to happen next, but I figured I might need chunks of money. The voucher spilled out of the slot—when I put my signature and thumbprint on it, it would turn into a very high denomination dollar bill. I noticed that it was made out to me only—Carol's name wasn't on it. Her name wasn't on the account receipt either.

  Why was that?

  Inside the blanked silence of a street-side phone booth, I plugged in the old SenTrax Tele, long-time hackers' favorite. I ran a program that snagged and ghosted a raw tandem. Now I could call anyone I wanted, and the call would appear to originate through the AmerEx Trouble Line.

  CREDITERM was my first call. Using my portable comp and a couple of sweet little utility programs, I accessed their credit records, the sacred books of plastic money. I asked for a read-out on Carol. NEG REC/REQUERY? Bullshit. Something peculiar was happening. I did it again. NEG REC/RECONFIRM ID.

  Then I went to the NDB, the National Data Bank, where every citizen is caught in lines of electromagnetic force. Ran Carol's name again—first alpha access, which any inquisitive bureaucracy has its command, then the beta codes, which dig deep to pull up a mass of unverified, undigested garbage. NO REF repeat NO REF READDRESS SOC SEC.

  Something ugly came into view then. Just a small dot on the screen, but getting larger—

  So I ran the same trip on Bergman. NO REF repeat NO REF.

  Negative evidence they call it, the dog that doesn't bark in the night. Great, but evidence of what?

  Crowds surged around me on Telegraph Avenue, which was enjoying a resurgence of trade and popularity—nostalgia had taken hold for the twentieth century in general, the "gentle decade" of the 60s in particular. Flower children and all that, never mind the, uh, war that had been going on. Bright sunshine, blue sky, the hot hum of money changing hands. . . .

  There I stood, and for the first time I got the feeling that Carol had gone much farther away than I had guessed. Fundamental law of our times: To exist is to be transformed into information, to have NDB files, credit ratings, to be significant data in the computers of banks, police. Corollary: To have no such files—

  What kind of crazy-assed game was BioTron playing?

  Rolly lived deep in Oakland, in the kind of neighborhood where people clear the street after dark so they don't interfere with the nighttime's quick and violent business. Here, if I saw a group of young men—black, white, yellow, or brown—looking me over, I'd run now and hope I had enough of a head start.

  I buzzed Rolly's apartment, and he looked me over through the vidscreen and told me to come up. This was a climb through the usual sleazy stairways, past litter, peeling walls, bare bulbs. Rolly had always remained pretty much oblivious to his immediate surroundings; his real life was out in the networks.

  When he opened the door, I stepped into a combination of Condo Grosso and Teletronics Heaven. Consoles and bubble boxes in tottering stacks, a bank of flatscreens, snarls of optic fiber and cable, inverted plastic boxes of connectors—all of it junk, kipple, the spill-off from Rolly's constant restructuring of his system, which would be behind a steel door in another room.

  Jah rockers danced across the wall; the room reverberated with their slack-string bass and syntho-drums. Scattered around were stacks of empty pizza boxes, piles of tamale wrappers, beer cans, filled ashtrays, dirty clothes. Streamers of print-out were tacked to two walls. Brave New Silicon World.

  He looked just as he did the last time I saw him—thinning hair plastered to his white skull, sallow skin, a roll of fat around his middle. The All-American boy, my friend Rolly.

  I walked to the control console and punched off the Jah rockers. "Got to talk, Roily," I said.

  It all came out, and he just stood there, his eyes wide as he listened to the story of blood and pain that he knew—that all of us know—is out there, happening to somebody in the night.

  "Man," he said. "Carol . . . I'm sorry."

  And that's when I cried a little for the first time. I sat in an old chair and hammered on its stuffed arms and shook with sobs and yelled—

  Then I told him damage. I wanted to be able to take it to the limit, and quickly, like piranha on a baby goat.

  "I'm slack, man," he said, "slack—no chops."

  That was bullshit, and he knew it. "I want to hammer these bastards, man," I said. He paced the floor, kicked empty boxes, dithered. Th
en he began to think about how to do it. "I brought my best shit, Rolly," I said, and waved the plastic sheaf of CDs. I had him.

  One side of the room was filled with tented plastic—a clean room—where Roily sat like a man with a congenital immune deficiency or a caterpillar in its chrysalis. In front of him were the flat silver rectangles of viewscreens; behind them, bare processor chips, small dark blocks on legs of fine golden filament. To one side were processor and bubble boxes, traditional cubes of multi-hued red, next to chrome-armed chip burners and flat black wave guide boxes. Connecting all were knots of flesh-toned cable and strands of optic fiber sheathed in carnival colors. Inside the clean room the whole multiplexed electronic package could lie open like an autopsied corpse.

  He worked through the night, with me providing occasional suggestions and doing the routine work, the stuff that didn't require Rolly's level of cunning and artistry. He sweated, and his face was red; he played his keyboards like a virtuoso and kept his modems alive most of the night as he called in favors from all over the country.

  Lethe, a seventeen-year-old girl from Long Island, had a sweet set of monetary transfer access and com codes. Johnny Too Bad in Austin had played games with the Stock Exchange and had worked out a very slick series of burns. Anon-Al, a translator at Fort Meade for NSA, had the real prize—a piece of killer software cooked by some Agency hotshots to demonstrate how any databank could be turned to hash. It should work once on just about anything. Or on everything. He hit these fellow souls within the first two hours, and from there it rolled.

  I sat much of the night back in the front room, sitting in the old stuffed corduroy chair, pulling stuffing out of a tear and thinking. I kept returning to what the silicon kids called a "K-9 anomaly"—a program doing things it was never intended to do and shouldn't be capable of. A werewolf program.

  For instance: BioTron could have nailed us at the Hyatt (no problem there, as we were using standard industrial encryption and unscrambled lines), and they might have been able to remove Carol from our checking accounts, but they couldn't have pulled Carol and Bergman from CREDITERM and the NDB—no way. Negative evidence all right, of the impossible.

  I thought, screw it. No accounting for the weirdness of The Real.

  Early the next morning we had located BioTron's heaviest clandestine hitter, the guy who would have ultimate control of any operation like this one. Using programs out of a switch-and-dummy box hooked to a local switchboard in Buenos Aires so that a backchase was impossible, we addressed a message to T. Edward Shales, BioTron's counterintelligence chief without portfolio.

  Our message was pretty simple: let's deal; if you don't want to, we've got some bad economic news for you. Have a look at LiveSoft Projects, we told him; its stock will have disappeared, and it's going to cost someone a hell of trouble to bring it back. Then think about the implications.

  We got the usual "don't know what you're talking about, never heard of such terrible happenings" reply within an hour. Rolly skimmed it off the B.A. dummy, and we both had a sour laugh.

  Then we waited for hell to freeze.

  By nine o'clock that night brimstone had turned to solid ice, and we both were ready to collapse.

  Finally, BioTron's reply. On the tape, T. Edward Shales himself—heavy and solid and anonymous—sat in dark-suited splendor and said, "I believe you got a problem, really I do. But we are not it. I did not authorize the incursion you describe, and I can categorically state that no one else in this corporation did. In short, you have got some disinformation here somewhere.

  "Dr. Moshe Bergman was an employee of ours, but his period of postresignation surveillance showed nothing important. We are also aware of the man Oakley, who as you say has been shot—his short-term future appears uncertain, according to the George Washington University Hospital computer.

  "Frankly, however, we thought Bergman was of no further concern to us. Now, however, we do have an interest in this affair. Should you wish our assistance, we can perhaps negotiate terms. We would be particularly interested in quick restoration of LiveSoft's portfolio."

  That tape hurt me. Remember, putting the crush on BioTron was all I had, and I saw that I couldn't. They were ignoring me; despite what we had showed them, we appeared to have no leverage. I said, "Rolly, I want to do it tonight. I want to hit them like we planned."

  "No, man. It's like uh . . . shit . . . nuclear deterrence. Like, when you've got to use it, man, then shit—" Like many silicon kids, Roily had an uncertain grip on words—Carol said they were people who had no native language.

  It came to me all at once then, and I don't know whether I believed it or not. But I had to have him, I couldn't do this myself.

  So here's what I told Rolly, and you've got to understand, I was driven by my need and dancing in the dark. I worked with questions like these: What if I was right the first time, and BioTron couldn't have done these things? What then if T. Edward Shales wasn't lying?

  I told Rolly that we had hold of something strange, not BioTron but the spirit of our times, the living essence of the information age. We tire its senses, the datanets its nervous system and memory, all the interchange among systems its consciousness. Not a werewolf program, but Gaia in silicon, born of wire and electromagnetic wave—new life, new being.

  "Do you really believe that?" he asked. I had shaken him, he was seeing the descent of some testing angel into the dark night of his soul.

  And I did for a moment, nodding, as I reached to him out of my absolute need and said, "It's all that makes sense." The datanets were the key, I said. Gaia must have been brought into being by the saturation of the planet with information, and the nets are the loci. I said that INFINET was crucial, and its creation was the point of transformation, the birth of Gaia. So that's where we would go after it.

  I told Rolly I was going to use Gaia's senses, its nervous system and memory, against it.

  Early the next morning I was back in the nether world I had first discovered as an adolescent, where space, time, and identity are blurred, "real time" is just a choice among others, and what really matters is the flexible, multidimensional spacetime of the networks.

  Using BART, I covered the Bay Area. From one station to another I would go, then out to find a pay phone. Pop the phone receiver into the computer's blue-green modem, a silver disk into the computer. RUN the programs, disconnect, go.

  I was sowing chaos. Gaia couldn't tell good data from bad, so the programs I fed into it were just the usual stuff of its perceptions.

  Banque Nationale de Paris and Credit Lyonnais, Bayerische Vereinsbank and Deutsche Bank, Frankfurt, Barclays and National Westminster Bank, Citibank and Bank of America, Union Bank of Switzerland, Dai-Ichi Kangyo Bank of Tokyo, Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation—I forget how many others, but I was forming the heaviest conglomerate that ever hit the markets and exchanges to make some heavyweight purchases: BASF Aktiengesellschaft, Chiyoda Chemical, Du-pont, ICI, Standard Oil of New Jersey, Sony Corporation, and BioTron itself, oh yes . . . run the programs, promise payment in cash, stock, options. Stocks, futures, currency, you bet. We made pretty good efforts to corner the silver market—the Hunt brothers would have been envious—pork belly and potato futures. . . .

  Some purchases and manipulations would go through, some wouldn't. And pretty soon someone was going to figure out that there was some strange and illegal action taking place. Confusion—markets scrambled, stocks, futures, and currencies in disarray. At one level, just another tender of our bona fides, a promise to Gaia—we can touch you; at another level, diversions.

  I was really after INFINET, the network of networks, but I couldn't hit it straight on. It was too well defended without more lead time than I'd had. But some of the older auxiliaries did just fine. We got in.

  INFINET had programs which allowed it to read from and write to everything that was in its member networks, which included about every civilian network in the world, along with the low-to-medium parts of military networks
such as ARPANET. I was planting into INFINET that lovely hostile software that NSA had created.

  If it's triggered, INFINET and the member networks will disappear in the world's biggest information crash. The only uncertainty regards the military nets—how good are their countermeasures? Well, we may find out.

  All night long we had put the programs together, and now I planted them. READ, WRITE, LIST, ERASE—one instruction's just like another to a computer. Garbage in, pal, garbage in.

  Remember those tapes—we've all seen them—of buildings getting torn down? Silence and slow motion is the way I like to see it happen, masonry and invisible iron frame looming high and still, then disintegrating and dropping straight into itself, turning into no more than a pile of rubble where a building used to stand, just something for the dump trucks to carry away.

  Doesn't matter how big the building is, or how strong. You just find the right spots and plant your charges. . . .

  So I planted my charges, then went home.

  I took the house computer out of its passive mode, told it yes, I was answering calls, and sat in the study. Was everything I had said to Rolly a con and delusion?

  I watched the slow turn of our light sculpture. It was a copy of the Charles Cohen "Illuminations IX" in the Museum of Modern Art. Blue, red, yellow, white, green—the colors formed their geometric patterns. Along with double jet-lag and exhaustion from anxiety and fear, the patterns hypnotized me. I slept.

  I was awakened by a high-pitched, pulsing sound—a thousand satellites holding a family reunion, maybe, or calling home. The display screen on the opposite wall came alive and was filled with racing lines of characters, and both printers chattered as paper boiled out of them.

  Then the light sculpture began a crazy dance. Sheets of light formed, grids of color appeared on them, and they folded and twisted as if in a strong wind. Doughnuts and spheres, regular and irregular polyhedrons, bundles of rods and cones, spiraling helices—these figures and others climbed from floor to ceiling, then raced away down lines of vanishing perspective.