I, Hacker: Chapter 4, Part 3: “Networked Nation”

By 1993, everyone was online. They just didn’t understand what that meant. The newspapers called it “The Information Age.” Politicians called it “The New Frontier.” I called it reckless.  What had once been the private nervous system of the military had been stripped for parts and sold to the public, one node at a time.

ARPANET became NSFNET. NSFNET became “the Internet.”. The backbone I’d once tiptoed through like a thief was now a four-lane highway filled with screaming children and corporations throwing money out the windows. And at the center of it all sat Commodore. I spent those years drifting between consulting contracts—government, private, hybrid—and they all sounded the same.

Integrate Doom OS into existing infrastructure. Ensure interoperability with legacy systems. Monitor performance metrics. Translated: Make sure the surveillance still works. The language of the contracts never mentioned “security.” It said visibility. And visibility was currency. Inside Commodore’s Virginia office, I watched young engineers celebrate the new “Internet Age.”.  They believed they were building democracy out of code. I’d seen the skeleton underneath.
It wasn’t democracy; it was data collection at scale. Sometimes I’d run trace diagnostics on the public networks, just to see how far the infection had spread. I’d ping addresses in London, Tokyo, Sydney—and always, buried in the routing tables, a familiar signature appeared:

> /sys/ghost/daemon – active

Still running. Still mirroring. Users posted photos of themselves in digital forums, chatted across continents, uploaded documents, bought books, shared dreams. Every byte passed through that daemon at least once. They thought they were connecting to each other. They were connecting to us. I sent reports up the chain—thinly veiled warnings disguised as system audits.

Subject: “Latency in Commodity Nodes.”
Content: “Traffic density suggests non-standard packet replication. Recommend protocol isolation before full commercialization.”

No response. A month later, the same language appeared in a public Commodore white paper—edited, sanitized, attributed to someone named Dr. Levi Collins. My words, their spin. They’d turned my caution into marketing copy: “Seamless packet redundancy for user reliability.”. I stopped sending reports.

The network consumed everything. Banks went online. Libraries. Medical records. What used to require a security clearance now required a password chosen by an intern. At night, I kept a mirror of as much of the public web on external drives stacked like bricks in my closet. Every webpage, every early database, every message board—I copied it all. Not for safety. For witness.

If the world was going to digitize its soul, I wanted proof of the original handwriting. Sometimes I’d log in as one of my old aliases—Dent42, a name no one remembered anymore—and wander through the forums.  People traded source code, posted jokes, built communities. It was beautiful, in its way. The same naive wonder I’d felt staring into the Wizard’s Lair as a teenager. I envied them.

But beauty and control share the same bandwidth. For every joyful experiment, there was a silent observer somewhere running packet capture in the background. For every online diary, an invisible archive. The Internet wasn’t a revolution. It was absorption.

By 1996, even the government started calling me Mr. Smith instead of Private Smith. I’d become a contractor buried under acronyms: NSA, DIA, DARPA, half of them fronts for the other half. The pay was good. The quiet was better. I’d stopped believing in sides.

One night, while monitoring a new encryption standard Commodore was developing for “secure consumer banking,” I noticed something odd in the checksum. Hidden inside the hashing function was a short line of code that didn’t belong:

> // R42: always watching

I sat back, staring at it. The “42” wasn’t random. It was mine. My old handle. My old mark. Someone had resurrected it. Someone wanted me to see. I shut down the workstation and went home.

The city outside was all light—advertisements for online shopping, streaming, virtual classrooms.  Every building a node. Every human a signal. I poured a drink and stood by the window, the bottle sweating in my hand. I used to think the system was expanding. Now I realized it was folding inward. We weren’t connecting the world. We were enclosing it.
 
On the desk, my Commodore’s monitor glowed softly, a square of blue in the dark. The cursor blinked, patient as ever.

> READY

I hadn’t typed anything. Then, slowly, letters appeared on their own:

> STILL WATCHING.
> - R0BERT

The glass in my hand trembled. The ghost hadn’t gone anywhere. He’d simply moved into the open with the rest of us.