The Blue Nowhere

somebody was going through her computer from a remote location.”
    Shelton shook his head in confusion.
    But Frank Bishop said, “You mean, it’s like you know a burglar was inside your house because he moved furniture and didn’t put the pieces back. Even though he was gone when you got home.”
    Gillette nodded. “Exactly.”
    Andy Anderson—as much a wizard as Gillette in some areas—hefted the thin disk in his hand. He couldn’t help feeling impressed. When he was considering asking Gillette to help them, the cop had looked through some of Gillette’s script, which the prosecutor had submitted as evidence in the case against him. After examining the brilliant lines of source code Anderson had two thoughts. The first was that if anyone could figure out how the perp had gotten into Lara Gibson’s computer it was Wyatt Gillette.
    The second was pure, painful envy of the young man’s skills. Throughout the world there were tens of thousands of code crunchers—people who happily churn out tight, efficient software for mundane tasks—and there were just as many script bunnies, the term for kids who write wildly creative but clumsy and largely useless programs just for the fun of it. But only a few programmers have both the vision to conceive of script that’s “elegant,” the highest form of praise for software, and the skill to write it. Wyatt Gillette was just such a codeslinger.
    Once again Anderson noticed Frank Bishop looking around the room absently, his mind elsewhere. He wondered if he should call headquarters and see about getting a new detective on board. Let Bishop go chase his MARINKILL bank robbers—if that’s what was so goddamn important to him—and give us somebody who at least can pay attention.
    He turned back to Gillette. “So the bottom line is he got into her system thanks to some new, unknown program or virus.”
    “Basically, that’s it.”
    “Could you find out anything else about him?” Mott asked.
    “Only what you already know—that he’s been trained on Unix.”
    Unix is a computer operating system, just like MS-DOS or Windows, though it controls larger, more powerful machines than personal computers.
    “Wait,” Anderson interrupted. “What do you mean, what we already know?”
    “That mistake he made.”
    “What mistake?”
    Gillette frowned. “When the killer was inside her system he keyed some commands to get into her files. But they were Unix commands—he must’ve entered them by mistake before he remembered her machine was running Windows. You must’ve seen them in there.”
    Anderson looked questioningly at Stephen Miller, who’d apparently been the one analyzing the victim’s computer in the first place. Miller said uneasily, “I noticed a couple lines of Unix, yeah. But I just assumed she’d typed them.”
    “She’s a civilian,” Gillette said, using the hacker term for a casual computer user. “I doubt she’d even heard of Unix, let alone known the commands.” In Windows and Apple operating systems people control their machines by simply clicking on pictures or typing common English words for commands; Unix requires users to learn hundreds of complicated codes.
    “I didn’t think, sorry,” the bearish cop said defensively. He seemed put out at this criticism over what he must have thought was a small point.
    So Stephen Miller had made yet another mistake, Anderson reflected. This had been an ongoing problem ever since Miller had joined CCU recently. In the 1970s Miller had headed a promising company that made computers and developed software. But his products were always one step behind IBM’s, Digital Equipment’s and Microsoft’s and he eventually went bankrupt. Miller complained that he’d often anticipated the NBT (the “Next Big Thing”—the Silicon Valley phrase for an innovation that would revolutionize the industry) but the “big boys” were continually sabotaging him.
    After his company went under he’d gotten divorced and left the Machine World for a few years then surfaced as a freelance programmer. Miller drifted into computer security and finally applied to the state police. He wouldn’t’ve been Anderson’s first choice for a computer cop but, then again, CCU had very few qualified applicants to choose from. (Why earn $60,000 a year working a job where there’s achance you might get shot, when you can make ten times that at one of Silicon Valley’s corporate legends?)
    Besides, Miller—who’d never