The Blue Nowhere

occurred a few years after he graduated from Berkeley: his first online meeting with a young hacker named CertainDeath, the username of Jon Patrick Holloway, in the #hack chat room.
    Gillette was working as a programmer during the day. But like many code crunchers he was bored with his job and counted the hours until he could get home to his machine to explore the Blue Nowhere and meet kindred souls, which Holloway certainly was; their first online conversation lasted four and a half hours.
    Initially they traded phone phreaking information. They then put theory into practice and pulled off what they declared to be some “totally moby” hacks, cracking into the Pac Bell, AT&T and British Telecom switching systems.
    From these modest beginnings they began prowling through corporate and government machines.
    Soon other hackers began to seek them out, running Unix “finger” searches on the Net to find them by name and then sitting at the young men’s virtual feet to learn what the gurus had to teach. After a year or so of hanging out online with various regulars he and Holloway realized that they’d become a cybergang—a rather legendary one, as a matter of fact. CertainDeath, the leader and bona fide wizard. Valleyman, the second in command, the thoughtful philosopher of the group and nearly as good a codeslinger as CertainDeath. Sauron and Klepto, not as smart but half crazy and willing to do anything online. Others too: Mosk, Replicant, Grok, NeuRO, BYTEr. . . .
    They needed a name and Gillette had delivered: “Knights of Access” had occurred to him after playing a medieval MUD game for sixteen hours straight.
    Their reputation spread around the world—largely because they wrote programs that could get computers to do amazing things. Far too many hackers and cyberpunks weren’t programmers at all—they were referred to contemptuously as “point-and-clickers.” But the leaders of the Knights were skilled software writers, so good that they didn’t even bother to compile many of their programs—turning the raw source code into working software—because they knew clearly how the software would perform. (Elana—Gillette’s ex-wife, whom he’d met around this time—was a piano teacher and she said Gillette and Holloway reminded her of Beethoven, who could imagine his music so perfectly in his head that once he’d written it the performance was anticlimactic.)
    Recalling this, he now thought of his ex-wife. Not far from here was the beige apartment where he and Elana had lived for several years. He could picture the time they spent together so clearly; a thousand images leapt from deep memory. But unlike the Unix operating system or a math coprocessor chip, the relationship between him and Elana was something he couldn’t understand. He didn’t know how to take it apart and look at the components.
    And therefore it was something he couldn’t fix.
    This woman still consumed him, he longed for her, he wanted a child with her . . . but in the matter of love Wyatt Gillette knew he was no wizard.
    He now put these reflections aside and stepped under the awning of a shabby Goodwill store near the Sunnyvale town line. Once he was out of the rain he looked around him then, seeing he was alone, reached into his pocket and extracted a small electronic circuit board, which he’d had with him all day. When he’d gone back to his cell at San Ho that morning to collect the magazines and clippings for his excursion to the CCU office he’d taped the board to his right thigh, near his groin.
    This board, which he’d been working on for the past six months, was what he’d intended to smuggle out of prison from the beginning—not the phone phreaking red box, which he’d slipped into his pocket sothat the guards would find that and, he hoped, let him leave prison without going through the metal detector again.
    In the computer analysis lab back at CCU forty minutes ago he’d pulled the board off his skin and successfully tested it. Now in the pale, fluorescent light from the Goodwill shop he examined the circuit again and found that it had survived his jog from CCU just fine.
    He slipped it back into his pocket and stepped inside the store, nodding a greeting to the night clerk, who said, “We close at ten.”
    Gillette knew this; he’d checked on their hours earlier. “I won’t be long,” he assured the man then proceeded to pick out a change of clothing, which, in the best tradition of social