I, Hacker: Chapter 1, Part 3: “Ghosts in the Wires”

 
The cursor was waiting. I didn’t know what for, but it was there, like a door that wouldn’t open until you found the right key.

The key came two weeks later, secondhand and scratched, wrapped in a plastic grocery bag by a guy named Tom who hung around the Radio Shack on Park Avenue. Tom was twenty-five, smelled like solder smoke, and always had the latest rumors about hardware that “fell off a truck.” He sold me a 300 baud modem for twenty dollars cash.

It looked like a beige ashtray with rubber cups on top. A direct-connect acoustic coupler. You set your phone handset into the cups like it was being tucked in for the night. It came with no manual, just a sticky note that said:

ATDT 555-xxxx

“I don’t know if it works,” Tom said, already backing toward the door. “If it fries your line, you never saw me.”

I biked home with it balanced on my knees. My mother was at work, as usual. The house was quiet, except for the refrigerator’s wet, rattling hum.

I cleared space on the desk next to the Commodore, coiled the phone cord, and plugged the modem into the wall. The handset barely fit in the rubber cups. The whole setup looked like a ransom note made of electronics. I typed:

> ATDT 5551234

The modem emitted a click and then a string of noises I’d never heard before: a squeal, a hiss, a burst of tones like an alien warble. The TV screen flickered, then filled with a single line:

> CONNECT 300

Then more text:

> WELCOME TO THE WIZARD’S LAIR
> A BULLETIN BOARD SYSTEM
> (C)1981 PHREAKERJACK

I blinked. The cursor blinked back.
It wasn’t like television. This wasn’t a show being broadcast. This was a tunnel. Somewhere, in another house, another person had a machine waiting for mine. The text wasn’t prerecorded. It was alive. I typed something stupid:

> HELLO?

A pause. Then text appeared:

> WHO’S THIS?

I hesitated. For a moment, I felt like I was trespassing, like I’d cracked open a secret door and stepped into someone’s locked room. Then I remembered the handles I’d seen scrawled on BBS numbers in the back of BYTE magazine. People didn’t use real names here. I needed one. My eyes landed on a copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy lying face-down on my bed. The spine was cracked. The page number folded. Chapter “Dent.” I typed:

> DENT42

Another pause. Then:

> WELCOME DENT42
> NEW USER DETECTED
> TYPE HELP FOR COMMANDS

The air in my room changed. I don’t know how else to describe it. The faint smell of hot plastic and dust mixed with something sharper, like ozone before a thunderstorm. My heart was pounding. The world outside — my street, my school, my mother’s double shifts, my father’s absence — all of it fell away.
I was in a room I couldn’t see, with a person I didn’t know, inside a network no one understood.
I explored until my eyes hurt. Message boards. Text files. Lists of other BBS numbers. Programs you could download — crude games, utilities, encryption scripts with names like “LOCKJAW” and “NOVA.”
Every time I pressed RETURN, something new appeared. Every command was a door. Every door led to another corridor, and somewhere at the end of one of them was another door marked “PRIVATE” with a digital padlock. And I wanted in.

At some point, my mother’s key rattled in the lock. She called my name. I ripped the phone handset out of the modem like I’d been caught with contraband. The screen blinked back to READY.
She opened my door a crack, still in her uniform, her eyes lined with exhaustion. “You eat yet?” she asked.

I nodded too quickly. “Yeah.”

“Don’t stay up all night with that thing,” she said. “You’ll fry your brain.”

“I won’t,” I lied.

She closed the door. I set the phone back in the cradle, the rubber cups still warm, and stared at the screen.

> READY

The cursor blinked. Waiting. Always waiting. Only now I knew what it was waiting for: me.