I, Hacker: Chapter 4, Part 1: "Commodore Rises"

Discharge papers are thin things for the weight they carry. One stamped sheet of government letterhead, a handshake, a “thank-you for your service,” and suddenly you’re a civilian again — free, in theory. In practice, it felt like being unplugged mid-sentence.

I left Fort Meade in late 1988 with a duffel bag, a few pay stubs, and a head full of code no one had the clearance to hear. The air outside the base tasted wrong — too open, too quiet. For years every movement, every breath, had been structured by procedure. Now the world just waited, shapeless and loud.

I rented a one-bedroom apartment in Arlington that smelled of dust and resignation. The furniture came from a thrift store: a sagging couch, a folding table, a lamp with nicotine-yellow shade. I set my old Commodore 64 on the desk like a relic from a simpler religion and stared at its keyboard for a long time before turning it on. The startup screen blinked blue, polite and stupid:

> READY

I wasn’t. Civilian life had too much noise of the wrong kind — television chatter, polite small talk, people who wanted to know what you did but never why. I took contract work writing small utilities for local firms: payroll macros, serial-port diagnostics, file-transfer daemons for companies that didn’t yet know what “online” meant. It paid the rent and nothing more. Every few weeks a manila envelope would appear in my mailbox with no return address, just a single sheet of paper inside:

> PROJECT: VANTAGE
> REQUEST: TELECOM PROTOCOL REVIEW
> CONTACT: SECURE CHANNEL ALPHA

No signature. But I knew the style — the clipped phrasing, the precision of someone who never wasted keystrokes. R0BERT.

He hadn’t disappeared; he’d simply changed offices. I told myself I’d ignore the invitations. That lasted about a day. The first job was a “consultation” for a communications contractor in Reston, Virginia — a front, of course. They called themselves Lydian Systems, a name chosen because it sounded safe and vaguely scientific. Their office sat in an anonymous strip of gray buildings with tinted windows and no signage. Inside, the walls were bare except for a single poster that read INFORMATION IS INFRASTRUCTURE.

The receptionist handed me a non-disclosure agreement thick enough to break fingers, then directed me to a conference room where two men in short-sleeve shirts waited beside a beige workstation.

They wanted me to “review” a routing module for a data-exchange prototype — code that looked eerily familiar. Comments written in the same syntax I’d used at Fort Meade. Recursive calls I could have authored in my sleep. Even the variable names had my fingerprints.

I scrolled through a few hundred lines, heart sinking and rising at once.

“Where’d you get this?” I asked.

One of the men shrugged. “Transferred from a Defense project. They said you’d understand it.”
I did. Too well.

They paid in cash. Always. No signatures, no receipts. After the third contract, I stopped pretending this was freelance work. It was continuation — the same machine, new label.

The government had learned something during the Reagan years: outsourcing bought silence. A civilian consultant couldn’t leak what he didn’t officially know. At night I lay on the couch, listening to the city hum through the thin walls, and thought about how ARPANET’s veins were spreading outward — universities, corporations, even a few hobbyists dialing in from home. What had been secret was now infrastructure. The shadows I’d walked through were turning into highways.

One evening, while testing a packet monitor on the Commodore, the screen flickered. A line of text appeared — not from my code, not from any local process:

> STAY USEFUL.
> - R0BERT

I typed back before I could stop myself:

> ALWAYS.

The cursor blinked twice, then vanished. The next morning, another envelope arrived. Same stationery, new project name: MINDLINK CIV.

No description. No payment terms. Just an address: Commodore Business Machines, West Chester, PA.
I read it three times. Apparently, the future had a corporate logo now.