The Blue Nowhere

Net was in text form and navigating from one site to another was extremely cumbersome. The Web is still in its adolescence, having been born a little over a decade ago at CERN, the Swiss physics institute.
    Gillette searched through the underground hacking sites on the Web—the eerie, Tenderloin districts of the Net. Gaining entry to some of these sites required an answer to an esoteric question on hacking, finding and clicking on a microscopic dot on the screen or supplying a passcode. None of these barriers, though, barred Wyatt Gillette for more than a minute or two.
    From site to site to site, losing himself further and further in the Blue Nowhere, prowling through computers that might have been in Moscow or Cape Town or Mexico City. Or right next door in Cupertino or Santa Clara.
    Gillette sped through this world so quickly that he was reluctant to take his fingers off the keys for fear of losing his stride. So rather than jotting notes with pen and paper, as most hackers did, he copied material he thought was useful and pasted it into a word-processing window he kept open on the screen.
    From the Web he searched the Usenet—the collection of 80,000newsgroups, in which people interested in a particular subject can post messages, pictures, programs, movies and sound clips. Gillette scoured the classic hacking newsgroups like alt.2600, alt.hack, alt.virus and alt.binaries.hacking.utilities, cutting and pasting whatever seemed relevant. He found references to dozens of newsgroups that hadn’t existed when he’d gone to jail. He jumped to those groups, scrolled through them and found mention of still others.
    More scrolling, more reading, more cutting and pasting.
    A snap under his fingers and on the screen he saw:
    mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
    One of his powerful keystrokes had jammed the keyboard, which had often happened when he’d been hacking. Gillette unplugged it, tossed it on the floor behind him, hooked up another one and started typing again.
    He then moved to the Internet Relay Chat rooms. The IRC was an unregulated no-holds-barred series of networks where you could find real-time discussions among people who had similar interests. You typed your comment, hit the ENTER key and your words appeared on the screens of everyone who was logged into the room at that time. He logged into the room #hack (the rooms were designated by a number sign followed by a descriptive word). It was in this same room where, as a young hacker, he’d spent thousands of hours, sharing information, arguing and joking with fellow hackers around the world.
    After the IRC Gillette began searching through the BBS, bulletin boards which are like Web sites but can be accessed for only the cost of a local phone call—no Internet service provider is required. Many were legitimate but many others—with names like DeathHack and Silent Spring—were the darkest parts of the online world. Completely unregulated and unmonitored, these were the places to go for recipes for bombs and poisonous gases and debilitating computer viruses that would wipe out the hard drives of half the population of the world.
    Following the leads—losing himself in Web sites, newsgroups, chat rooms and archives. Hunting . . .
    This is what lawyers do when they paw through hoary old shelvessearching for that one case that will save their client from execution, what sportsmen do easing through the grass toward where they thought they heard the snarl of a bear, what lovers do seeking the core of each other’s lust. . . .
    Except that hunting in the Blue Nowhere isn’t like searching library stacks or a field of tall grass or your mate’s smooth flesh; it’s like prowling through the entire ever-expanding universe, which contains not only the known world and its unshared mysteries but worlds past and worlds yet to come.
    Endless.
    Snap.
    He had broken another key—the all-important E. Gillette flung this keyboard into the corner of the cubicle, where it joined its dead friend.
    He plugged in a new one and kept going.
    A t 2:30 P.M. Gillette emerged from the cubicle. His back was racked with pure fiery pain from sitting frozen in one place. Yet he could still feel the exhilarating rush from that brief time he’d spent online and the fierce reluctance at leaving the machine.
    In the main part of the CCU he found Bishop talking with Shelton; the others were on telephones or standing around the white-board, looking over the evidence. Bishop noticed