I, Hacker: Chapter 1, Part 2: “Booting Up”

The cursor blinked at me like a dare.

I leaned closer, elbows on my knees, my breath fogging the screen. The little 13-inch TV hummed with a static that felt alive, like a distant signal from something buried under the floorboards. The words in the manual spread out on my desk — thick, cream-colored paper, diagrams of memory maps and flowcharts I couldn’t stop staring at. I typed the first thing the manual suggested.

> PRINT "HELLO"

I jabbed RETURN. HELLO appeared. My pulse jumped. Stupid. It was just text on a screen. But it was also something else — a voice from the void. I typed again.

> 10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD"
> 20 GOTO 10
RETURN.

The screen filled with a waterfall of HELLO WORLD HELLO WORLD HELLO WORLD until it blurred into an unreadable smear. My mother’s voice from the kitchen called, “You okay in there?” and I shouted back something like, “Yeah, just testing.” But I didn’t move. My hands were trembling on the keys.
This was mine.

Not a TV program. Not a movie. Not a radio station. Not something built by someone else. This was me, telling a machine to speak, and it obeyed.

Hours passed without me noticing. Pancakes turned to rubber on my plate. Tang grew a skin. My mother left for work and called out something about locking the door. The house grew quiet except for the rhythmic tick-tick of the cursor when I paused to think.

I worked through the manual line by line. Loops. Variables. IF-THEN. PEEK and POKE commands that let me prod memory directly like a surgeon poking at a brain. Each new command opened a hidden door.
I discovered how to make the screen flash. Then how to make it beep. Then how to draw crude shapes in blocky pixels. The smell of heated plastic filled the room — that faint electronic scent like hot dust and ozone. It was intoxicating. I wanted more.

By late afternoon, I was building my first game. Nothing fancy — a little program where a letter “O” moved across the screen like a ball and you had to catch it with an “X.” But when it worked, when the thing actually moved and responded to my key presses, I felt a jolt of adrenaline so pure it left my mouth dry. I was inside.

It wasn’t just code. It was a language, a conversation. The machine didn’t talk back — but it answered. And the answers were precise, uncompromising, logical. Nothing like the messy contradictions of people.

My father’s voice crept into my mind — something he’d said once before disappearing again: “You’ll never amount to anything messing with toys.” I smiled at the thought. This wasn’t a toy. This was a weapon. He just didn’t know it.

The sun dipped low outside the window. The streetlights flickered on, casting sodium-yellow bars across my desk. I still hadn’t left my chair. My stomach growled, but I ignored it.
I wrote my first password file — a little BASIC routine that encoded a string with a simple substitution cipher. Totally pointless. But it felt secret, like scribbling a diary in invisible ink.
I closed the notebook, capped my pen, and stared at the screen.

> READY

The cursor blinked. Waiting. Always waiting.

I didn’t know it yet, but that blinking cursor would be the backdrop to my life. The steady heartbeat of a new world opening — a world I’d never really leave.