I, Hacker: Chapter 3, Part 4: “Unseen Hands”

 For three nights, I didn’t connect.

It wasn’t fear. It was strategy. I knew better than to chase the hand that pulls back the curtain. The Code Room buzzed with its usual hum — same tired faces, same green flicker of phosphor screens. Sergeant Walters stalked the aisles, pretending to understand what we were typing. Every now and then, he’d clap a shoulder and say, “Good work, Private,” as though efficiency were contagious.

I played along. Debugged a communications relay, fixed an encryption handler, rewrote a checksum routine that had been broken for months. I made myself invisible again. But at night, when the room emptied and the hum softened into the kind of silence that makes secrets comfortable, I logged back in.

Not through my assigned terminal — that one was monitored. Instead, I used a training console in the adjacent room. Its usage logs were archived manually — updated only once a week, by a bored civilian clerk. Plenty of space to hide in between.

I connected through an alternate route, hopping through a relay at BBN Technologies before tunneling back toward the node where I’d found the message.

The file directory had changed.
The old public bulletin board was gone. In its place:
/usr/data/archive/ghostline/
Inside that, a single text file. note2.txt, I hesitated. Then opened it.

> HELLO, NOMAD.
> THOUGHT YOU MIGHT RETURN.
> DO YOU KNOW WHAT YOU'RE LOOKING FOR?
> - R0BERT

He’d named me. Not Daniel. Not Dent42. NOMAD.

That was impossible — the alias existed only in my local workspace, on a terminal that never left this building. No one should have seen it. Unless they were inside the system deeper than I was.
Unless they could see the map itself. I waited an hour before replying. The message window blinked with its cursor, steady and patient. I typed:

> DEPENDS ON WHAT YOU THINK I FOUND.
> - NOMAD

Sent it. Logged off. Disconnected the modem manually, heart pounding like it used to when I’d sneak out of the dorms. He replied the next night.

> EVERY SYSTEM HAS A PURPOSE.
> EVERY PURPOSE HAS A SHADOW.
> SOMETIMES THE SHADOW IS THE REAL MACHINE.
> -ROBERT

It wasn’t a threat. It wasn’t a warning. It read like philosophy — one technician to another.
I wanted to ask questions. Who was he? Where was he? What did he know about me? But I didn’t. I knew the rules: you never ask the real questions. You wait for the pattern to reveal itself.
So I replied simply:

> WHAT’S YOUR SYSTEM?
> -NOMAD

No answer that night. But something changed. A few days later, Walters called me into his office.
He never called anyone into his office. I stood at attention while he rifled through some printouts, trying to look authoritative. His desk was a disaster of coffee rings and forgotten memos.

“Private Smith,” he said finally, “we’ve been informed there’s a new training opportunity. Advanced Systems Analysis — Washington D.C. posting. They need candidates with your technical background.”

“Voluntary?” I asked.

He smirked. “You don’t volunteer in this outfit, son. You’re selected.”

Selected. I knew what that meant: reassignment through channels I wasn’t meant to understand.
I didn’t ask who made the request. I already had a guess. That night, I connected one more time. The ghostline directory had grown. Now there were multiple files, each marked by timestamp. The newest one: note3.txt

> TRANSFER REQUEST CONFIRMED.
> PACK LIGHT.
> - R0BERT

I sat staring at it, the cursor blinking after the final period, mocking me with its calm certainty.
He knew. Somehow, he knew. Either he was the Army, or he was behind it. Either way, the invisible conversation had moved from the digital to the physical. I logged off. Pulled my data notebook from behind the panel of my desk and tucked it into the lining of my duffel bag.

The reassignment came through within forty-eight hours.

Orders: report to Fort Meade, Maryland — home of the National Security Agency.
Cover story: advanced signal operations training.

No one in the Code Room said anything. They’d seen enough transfers to know better than to ask questions. Walters gave me a handshake that felt like relief. 

“Don’t break their computers,” he said.

“I’ll do my best,” I replied.

Two days later, I boarded a military transport plane under gray skies. The engines droned like distant thunder. The soldiers around me were loud, laughing, trying to drown out the weight of whatever came next. I stayed quiet. Headphones on. In my lap, I held a small, green notebook. Inside, a single phrase written in block letters:

EVERY PURPOSE HAS A SHADOW.

That night, at a layover base in Virginia, I found a communications terminal tucked behind a maintenance office. I couldn’t help myself. I logged in through the ARPANET gateway, tracing the same familiar routes.

No ghostline directory this time.
No R0BERT.
Just one message waiting in my inbox:

> MINDLINK.ACTIVE
> SEE YOU SOON

I stared at it until the cursor stopped blinking.