The Blue Nowhere

onto the school grounds. And they were surrounded by a twelve-foot-high stone wall, topped with barbed wire. And there was no way to get over that—at least no way for him, a chubby geek who hated heights—unless he cracked the passcode to one of the gates that opened onto the street. Which is whyhe was now cracking the passcode file of Herr Mein Führer Booty, excuse me, Dr. Willem C. Boethe, M.Ed., Ph.D.
    So far he’d easily hacked into Booty’s computer and downloaded the file containing the passcode (conveniently named Security Passcodes. Hey, way subtle, Booty!). What was stored in the file was, of course, an encrypted version of the password, which would have to be decrypted before Jamie could use it. But Jamie’s puny clone computer would take days to crack the code and so the boy was presently hacking into a nearby computer site to find a machine powerful enough to crack it in time for the magic deadline.
    Jamie knew that the Internet had been started as a largely academic network to facilitate the exchange of research, not keep information secret. The first organizations to be linked via the Net—universities—had far poorer security than the government agencies and corporations that had more recently come online.
    He now figuratively knocked on the door of Northern California Tech and Engineering College’s computer lab and was greeted with this:
    Username?
    Jamie answered: User.
    Passcode?
    His response: User.
    And the message popped up:
    Welcome, User.
    Hm, how ’bout an F minus for security, Jamie thought wryly and began to browse through the machine’s root directory—the main one—until he found what would be a very large supercomputer, probably an old Cray, on the school’s network. At the moment the machine was calculating the age of the universe. Interesting, but not as cool as Santana, Jamie thought. He nudged aside the astronomy project and uploaded a program he himself had written, called Crack-er, which started its sweet labor to extract the English-language password from Booty’s files. He—
    “Oh, hell shit,” he said in very un-Booty language. His computer had frozen up again.
    This had occurred several times recently and it pissed him off that he couldn’t figure out why. He knew computers cold and he could find no reason for this sort of jamming. He had no time for crashes, not today, with his 6:30 deadline. Still, the boy jotted the occurrence in his hacker’s notebook, as any diligent codeslinger would do, and restarted the system then logged back online.
    He checked on the Cray and found that the college’s computer had kept working away, running Crack-er on Booty’s password file, even while he’d been offline.
    He could—
    “Mr. Turner, Mr. Turner,” came a nearby voice. “What are we up to here?”
    The words scared the absolute hell out of Jamie. But he wasn’t so startled that he failed to hit ALT-F6 on his computer just before Principal Booty padded up to the computer terminal on his crepe-soled shoes.
    A screen containing an essay about the plight of the rain forest replaced the status report from his illegal cracking program.
    “Hi, Mr. Boethe,” Jamie said.
    “Ah.” The tall, thin man bent down, peering at the screen. “Thought you might be looking at nasty pictures, Mr. Turner.”
    “No, sir,” Jamie said. “I wouldn’t do that.”
    “Studying the environment, concerned about what we’ve done to poor Mother Nature, are we? Good for you, good for you. But I can’t help but notice that this is your physical education period. You should be experiencing Mother Nature firsthand. Out in the sports fields. Inhaling that good California air. Running and kicking goals.”
    “Isn’t it raining?” Jamie asked.
    “Misting, I’d call it. Besides, playing soccer in the rain builds character. Now, out we go, Mr. Turner. The greens are down one player. Mr. Lochnell turned left and his ankle turned right. Go to their aid. Your team needs you.”
    “I just have to shut down the system, sir. It’ll take a few minutes.”
    The principal walked to the door, calling, “I expect to see you out there in full gear in fifteen minutes.”
    “Yessir,” responded Jamie Turner, not revealing his huge disappointment at exchanging his machine for a muddy patch of grass and a dozen stupid students.
    Alt-F6ing out of the rain forest window, Jamie started to type a status request to see how his Crack-er program was doing on the passcode file. Then he paused,