The Blue Nowhere

him.
    Renegade334: Do you know Shawn?
    Triple-X: He hangs with Phate is all I know. Word is Phate couldn’t hack Trapdoor together by himself and Shawn helped him.
    Renegade334: He a wizard too?
    Triple-X: That’s what I hear. And that HE’S fucking scary too.
    Renegade334: Where is Shawn?
    Triple-X: Got the idea he’s in the Bay area. But that’s all I know.
    Renegade334: You sure it’s a man?
    Triple-X: No, but how many skirt hackers you know?
    Renegade334: Will you help us? We need Phate’s real e-mail address, Internet address, Web sites he visits, FTP sites he uploads to—anything like that.
    Gillette said to Bishop, “He won’t want to contact us online or here at CCU. Give me your cell phone number.”
    Bishop did and Gillette relayed it to Triple-X. The man didn’t acknowledge receiving the number and typed only:
    Triple-X: I’m logging off. We’ve been talking too long. I’ll think about it.
    Renegade334: We need your help. Please. . . .
    Triple-X: That’s weird.
    Renegade334: What?
    Triple-X: I don’t think I ever saw a hacker write please before.
    The connection terminated.
    A fter Phate had learned that Wyatt Gillette was helping the cops look for him and had left the little Animorph crying by the side of the road he’d ditched his car—the whiny brat could identify it—and bought a used clunker with cash. He then sped through the chill overcast to the warehouse he rented near San Jose.
    When he played his Real World game of Access he’d travel to a different city and set up house for a while but this warehouse was more or less his permanent residence. It was where he kept everything that was important to him.
    If, in a thousand years, archaeologists dug through layers of sand and loam and found this webby, dust-filled place they might believe that they’d discovered a temple devoted to the early computer age, as significant a find as when explorer Howard Carter unearthed the tomb of pharaoh Tutankhamen in Egypt.
    Here in this cold, empty space—an abandoned dinosaur pen—were all of Phate’s treasures. A complete EAI TR-20 analog computer from the sixties, a 1956 Heath electronic analog kit computer, an Altair 8800 and 680b computers, a twenty-five-year-old IBM 510 portable, a Commodore KIM-1, the famous TRS-80, a Kaypro portable, a COSMAC VIP, a number of Apples and Macs, tubes from the original Univac, brass gears and a number disk from a prototype of Charles Babbage’s never-completed Difference Engine from the 1800s and notes about it jotted down by Ada Byron—Lord Byron’s daughter and Babbage’s companion—who wrote instructions for his machines and is therefore considered the world’s first computer programmer. Dozens of other items of hardware too.
    On shelves were all the Rainbow Books—the technical manuals that cover every aspect of computer networking and security, their jackets standing out in the gloom with their distinctive oranges, reds, yellows, aquas, lavenders and teal greens.
    Perhaps Phate’s favorite souvenir was a framed poster of correspondence bearing the letterhead of the Traf-O-Data company, Bill Gates’s original name for Microsoft.
    But the warehouse was not simply a museum. It served a purpose too. Here were rows and rows of boxes of disks, a dozen working computers and perhaps two million dollars’ worth of specialized computer components, most of them for supercomputer construction and repair. Buying and selling these products through shell companies was how Phate made his substantial income.
    This also was his staging area—where he planned his games and where he changed his description and personality. Most of his costumes and disguises were here. In the corner was an ID 4000—a security identification pass maker—complete with magnetic strip burner. Other machines let him make active identification cards, which broadcast passwords for access to particularly secure facilities. With these machines—and a brief hack into the Department of Motor Vehicles, various schools and departments of vital records—he could become anyone he wanted to be and create the documentation to prove it. He could even write himself a passport.
    Who do you want to be?
    He now surveyed his equipment. From a shelf above his desk he took a cell phone and several powerful Toshiba laptops, into one of which he loaded a jpeg—a compressed photo image. He also found a large disk-storage box, which would serve his needs nicely.
    The shock and dismay of finding