The Blue Nowhere

enough to, more often than not, satisfy his obsession.
    He lived to understand how things worked and there was only one way to do that: take them apart.
    Not a single thing in the Gillette house had been safe from the boy and his tool kit.
    His mother would return home from her job to find young Wyatt sitting in front of her food processor, happily examining its component parts.
    “Do you know how much that cost?” she’d ask angrily.
    Didn’t know, didn’t care.
    But ten minutes later it would be reassembled and working fine, neither better nor worse for its dismemberment.
    And the Cuisinart’s surgery had occurred when the boy was only five years old.
    Soon, though, he’d taken apart and put back together all the things mechanical he’d cared to. He understood pulleys and wheels and gears and motors and they began to bore him so it was on to electronics. For a year he preyed upon stereos and record players and tape decks.
    Taking ’em apart, putting ’em back together . . .
    It didn’t take long before the boy had dispensed with the mysteries of vacuum tubes and circuit boards, and his curiosity began to prowl like a tiger with a reawakened hunger.
    But then he discovered computers.
    He thought of his father, a tall man with the perfect posture and trim hair that had been his legacy from his air force years. The man had taken him to a Radio Shack when his son was eight and told him he could pick out something for himself. “You can get anything you want.”
    “Anything?” asked the boy, eyeing the hundreds of items on the shelves.
    Anything you want . . .
    He’d picked a computer.
    It was a perfect choice for a boy who takes things apart—because the little Trash-80 computer was a portal to the Blue Nowhere, which is infinitely deep and infinitely complex, made up of layer upon layer of parts small as molecules and big as the exploding universe. It’s the place where curiosity can roam free forever.
    Schools, however, tend to prefer their students’ minds to be compliant first and curious second, if at all, and as he moved up through his grades young Wyatt Gillette began to founder.
    Before he bottomed out, though, a wise counselor plucked him out of the stew of high school, sized him up and sent him off to Santa Clara Magnet School Number Three.
    The school was billed as a “haven for gifted but troubled students residing in Silicon Valley”—a description that could, of course, be translated only one way: hacker heaven. A typical day for a typical student at Magnet Three involved cutting P.E. and English classes, tolerating history and acing math and physics, all the while concentrating on the only schoolwork that really mattered: talking with your buddies nonstop about the Machine World.
    Now, walking down a rainy sidewalk, not far from this very school in fact, he had many memories of his early days in the Blue Nowhere.
    Gillette clearly remembered sitting in the Magnet Three school yard, practicing his whistle for hour upon hour. If you could whistle into a fortress phone at just the right tone you could fool the phone switches into thinking you yourself were another switch and would be rewarded with the golden ring of access. (Everybody knew about Captain Crunch—the username of a legendary young hacker who had discovered that the whistle given away with the cereal of the same name generated a tone of 2600 megahertz, the exact frequency that let you break into the phone company’s long-distance lines and make free calls.)
    He remembered all the hours he’d spent in the Magnet Three cafeteria, which smelled like wet dough, or in study hall or the green corridors, talking about CPUs, graphics cards, bulletin boards, viruses, virtual disks, passwords, expandable RAM, and the bible—that is, William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer, which popularized the term “cyberpunk.”
    He remembered the first time he cracked into a government computer and the first time he got busted and sentenced to detention for hacking—at seventeen, still a juvenile. (Though he still had to do time;the judge was stern with boys who seized root of Ford Motor Company’s mainframe when they should’ve been out playing baseball—and the old jurist was more stern yet with boys who lectured him, adamantly pointing out that the world’d be in pretty shitty shape today if Thomas Alva Edison had been more concerned with sports than inventing.)
    But the most prominent memory at the moment was of an event that