The Blue Nowhere

the grassy hill outside the school, where the in-crowd gathered, and sneak cigarettes and make jokes about the geeks and losers. He dated, went to dances, worked on homecoming floats.
    Just like everybody else.
    He sat in Susan Coyne’s kitchen and fumbled under her blouse and tasted her braces. He and Billy Pickford took his dad’s vintage Corvette out onto the highway, where they got the car up to a hundred, and then sped home, where they dismantled and reset the odometer.
    He was happy some, moody some, boisterous some.
    Just like everybody else.
    At the age of seventeen Jon Holloway social engineered himself into one of the most normal and popular kids in school.
    He was so popular, in fact, that the funeral of his parents and brother was one of the most widely attended in the history of the small New Jersey town where they were living. (It was a miracle, friends of the family remarked, that young Jon just happened to be taking his computer to a repair shop early Saturday morning when the tragic gas explosion took the lives of his family.)
    Jon Holloway had looked at life and decided that God and his parents had fucked him up so much that the only way he could survive was to see it as a MUD game.
    And he was now playing again.
    Who do you want to be?
    In the basement of his pleasant suburban house in Los Altos Phate washed the blood off his Ka-bar knife and began sharpening it, enjoying the hiss of the blade against the sharpening steel he’d bought at Williams-Sonoma.
    This was the same knife he’d used to tease to stillness the heart of an important character in the game—Andy Anderson.
    Hiss, hiss, hiss . . .
    Access . . .
    As he swiped the knife against the steel Phate’s perfect memory recalleda passage from the article “Life in the Blue Nowhere,” which he’d copied into one of his hacking notebooks several years ago:
    The line between the real world and the machine world is becoming more and more blurred every day. But it’s not that humans are turning into automatons or becoming slaves to machines. No, we’re simply growing toward each other. In the Blue Nowhere, machines are taking on our personalities and culture—our language, myths, metaphors, philosophy and spirit.
    And those personalities and cultures are in turn being modified more and more by the Machine World itself.
    Think about the loner who used to return home from work and spend the night eating junk food and watching TV all night. Now, he turns on his computer and enters the Blue Nowhere, a place where he interacts—he has tactile stimulation on the keyboard, verbal exchanges, he’s challenged. He can’t be passive anymore. He has to provide input to get some response. He’s entered a higher level of existence and the reason is that machines have come to him. They speak his language.
    For good or bad, machines now reflect human voices, spirits, hearts and goals.
    For good or bad, they reflect human conscience, or the lack of conscience too.
    Phate finished honing the blade and wiped it clean. He replaced it in his footlocker and returned upstairs to find that his taxpayer dollars had been well spent; the Defense Research Center’s supercomputers had just finished running Jamie Turner’s program and had spit out the passcode to St. Francis Academy’s gates. He was going to get to play his game tonight.
    For good or bad  . . .
    A fter twenty minutes of poring over the printouts from Gillette’s search the team could find no other leads. The hacker sat down at aworkstation to write code for the bot that would continue to search the Net for him.
    Then he paused and looked up. “There’s one thing we have to do. Sooner or later Phate’s going to realize that you’ve got a hacker looking for him and he might try to come after us .” He turned to Stephen Miller. “What external networks do you have access to from here?”
    “Two—the Internet, through our own domain: cspccu.gov. That’s the one you’ve been using to get online. Then we’re also hooked to ISLEnet.”
    Sanchez explained the acronym. “That’s the Integrated Statewide Law Enforcement Network.”
    “Is it quarantined?”
    A quarantined network was made up of machines connected only to one another and only by hardwire cables—no one could hack in via a phone line or the Internet.
    “No,” Miller said. “You can log on from anywhere—but you need passcodes and have to get through a couple of firewalls.”
    “What outside networks could I