The Blue Nowhere

Mellon campus in Pittsburgh, CERT was a clearinghouse for information about viruses and other computer threats. It also warned systems administrators of impending hacker attacks.
    After the organization was described to him Bishop nodded. “Let’s give them a call.”
    Nolan added, “But don’t say anything about Wyatt. CERT’s connected with the Department of Defense.”
    Mott made the call and spoke to someone he knew at the organization. After a brief conversation he hung up. “They’ve never heard about Trapdoor or anything similar. They want us to keep them posted.”
    Linda Sanchez was staring at the picture of Andy Anderson, his wife and their daughter on his desk. In a troubled whisper she said, “So nobody who goes online is safe.”
    Gillette looked into the woman’s round brown eyes. “Phate can find out every secret you’ve got. He can impersonate you or read your medical records. He can empty your bank accounts, make illegal political contributions in your name, give you a phony lover and send your wife or husband copies of fake love letters. He could get you fired.”
    “Or,” Patricia Nolan added softly, “he could kill you.”
    “M r. Holloway, are you with us? . . . Mr. Holloway!”
    “Huh?”
    “‘Huh?’ ‘Huh?’ Is that the response of a respectful student? I’ve asked you twice to answer the question and you’re staring out the window. If you don’t do the assignments we’re going to have a prob—”
    “What was the question again?”
    “Let me finish, young man. If you don’t do the assignments then we’re going to have some problems. Do you know how many deserving students’re on the waiting list to get into this school? Of course you don’t and you don’t care either. Did you read the assignment?”
    “Not exactly.”
    “‘Not exactly.’ I see. Well, the question is: Define the octal number system and give me the decimal equivalent of the octal numbers 05726 and 12438. But why do you want to know the question if you haven’t read the assignment? You can hardly answer—”
    “The octal system is a number system with eight digits, like the decimal system has ten and the binary system has two.”
    “So, you remember something from the Discovery Channel, Mr. Holloway.”
    “No, I—”
    “If you know so much why don’t you come up to the board and try to convert those numbers for us. Up to the board, up you go!”
    “I don’t need to write it out. The octal number 05726 converts to decimal 3030. You made a mistake with the second number—12438 isn’t an octal number. There’s no digit 8 in the octal system. Only zero through seven.”
    “I didn’t make a mistake. It was a trick question. To see if the class was on its toes.”
    “If you say so.”
    “Okay, Mr. Holloway, time for a visit to the principal.”
    Sitting in the dining room office of his house in Los Altos, listening to a CD of James Earl Jones in Othello, Phate was roaming through the files of the young character, Jamie Turner, and planning that evening’s visit to St. Francis Academy.
    But thinking of the young student had brought back memories of his own academic history—like this difficult recollection of freshman high school math. Phate’s early schooling fell into a very predictable pattern. For the first semester he’d get straight A’s. But in the spring his grades would plunge to D’s or F’s. This was because he could stave off the boredom of school for the first three or four months but after that even going to class was too tedious for him and he’d invariably miss most of the second semester.
    Then his parents would ship him off to a new school. And the same thing would happen again.
    Mr. Holloway, are you with us?
    Well, that had been Phate’s problem all along. No, basically he hadn’t been with anyone ever; he was light-years ahead of them.
    His teachers and counselors would try. They’d put him into gifted-and-talented classes and then advanced G&T programs but even those didn’t hold his interest. And when he grew bored he became sadistic and vicious. His teachers—like poor Mr. Cummings, the freshman math teacher of the octal number incident—stopped calling on him, for fear that he’d mock them and their own limitations.
    After some years of this his parents—both scientists themselves—pretty much gave up. Busy with their own lives (Dad, an electrical engineer; Mom, a chemist for a cosmetics company), they were happy to hand off their boy to a