The Blue Nowhere

time.”
    “I remember you saying you never developed a light touch.”
    “I was hacking one time, must’ve been five years ago, and I broke my little finger. I didn’t even know it. I kept keying for another couple of hours. Until I saw my hand start to turn black.”
    “What was your endurance record?” Phate asked him.
    Gillette thought back. “Once I keyed for thirty-nine hours straight.”
    “Mine was thirty-seven,” Phate responded. “Would’ve been longer but I fell asleep. When I woke up I couldn’t move my hands for two hours. . . . Man, we did some serious shit, didn’t we?”
    Gillette said, “Remember that guy—the air force general? We saw him on CNN. He said that their recruiting Web site was tighter than Fort Knox and that no punks would ever hack it.”
    “And we got inside their VAX in, what, about ten minutes?”
    The young hackers had uploaded Kimberly-Clark advertisements onto the site; all the exciting pictures of jet fighters and bombers were replaced by product shots of Kotex boxes.
    “That was a good hack,” Phate said.
    “Oh, and how ’bout when we turned the White House Press Office main line into a pay phone?” Gillette mused.
    They fell silent for a moment. Finally Phate said, “Oh, man, you were better than me . . . you just got derailed. You married that Greek girl. What was her name? Ellie Papandolos, right?” He looked Gillette over closely as he mentioned her name. “You got divorced . . . but you’re still in love with her, right? I can see it.”
    Gillette said nothing.
    Phate continued, “You’re a hacker, man. You’ve got no business being with a woman. When machines’re your life you don’t need a lover. They’ll only hold you back.”
    Gillette countered, “What about Shawn?”
    A darkness crossed Phate’s face. “That’s different. Shawn understands exactly who I am. There aren’t many people who do.”
    “Who is he?”
    “Shawn’s none of your business,” Phate said ominously, then a moment later he smiled. “Come on, Wyatt, let’s work together. I know you want the scoop on Trapdoor. Wouldn’t you give anything to know how it works?”
    “I do know how it works. You use a packet-sniffer to divert messages. Then you use stenanography to embed a demon in the packets.The demon self-activates as soon as it’s inside the target machine and resets the communications protocols. It hides in a game program and self-destructs when somebody comes looking for it.”
    Phate laughed. “But that’s like saying, ‘Oh, that man flaps his arms and flies.’ How did I do it? That’s what you don’t know. That’s what nobody knows. . . . Don’t you wonder what the source code looks like? Wouldn’t you love to see that code, Mr. Curious? It’d be like getting a look at God, Wyatt. You know you want to.”
    For an instant Gillette’s mind scrolled through line after line of software programming—what he himself would write to duplicate Trapdoor. But when he got to a certain point, the screen in his mind’s eye went blank. He could see no further and he felt the terrible lust of curiosity consuming him. Oh, yes, he did want to see the source code. So very badly.
    But he said, “Just put the cuffs on.”
    Phate glanced at the clock on the wall. “Remember what I used to say about revenge when we were hacking?”
    “‘Hacker’s revenge is patient revenge.’ What about it?”
    “I just want to leave you with that thought. Oh, one other thing. . . . You ever read Mark Twain?”
    Gillette frowned and didn’t answer.
    Phate continued, “ A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. No? Well, it’s about this man in the 1800s who’s transported back in time to medieval England. There’s this totally moby scene where the hero or somebody is in some kind of hot water and the knights’re going to kill them, or whatever.”
    “Jon, put the cuffs on.” Gillette extended the gun.
    “Only what happens . . . this is pretty good. What happens is he has an almanac with him and he looks up the date in whatever year it is, and he sees that there was a total eclipse of the sun then. So he tells the knights if they don’t back off he’ll turn day to night. And of course they don’t believe him but then the eclipse happens and everybody freaks and the hero’s saved.”
    “So?”
    “I was worried I might get into some kind of hot water here.”
    “What’s your point?”
    Phate said nothing. But the point became evident a