I, Hacker: Chapter 4, Part 5: “The Mirror Age”

By the year 2000 the world had gone glossy. Every object hummed with an address. Every person had a login. The web was no longer a tool—it was geography. I’d meant to retire, or at least disappear. Instead I sat in the same apartment, now lit by the glow of three monitors, the Commodore 64 still holding court on its folding table like a relic that refused sainthood.

Outside, satellite dishes crowned the buildings. Inside, I watched the data flow maps: bright threads crossing the continents like veins under glass. The globe blinked, pulsed, synchronized. It looked alive. Maybe it was.

Commodore’s Doom OS had evolved into DoomNet, a full-scale social environment. Schools used it. Governments used it. Everyone lived inside some variation of it. The interface had become the world.

I logged in under an anonymous handle—Nomad, of course. Old habits die as slowly as code. The virtual city loaded: towers of data, plazas of user hubs, crowds made of light. People wandered through information the way we used to walk through malls. Every step recorded, every conversation cached, every gesture an entry in a log somewhere.

I moved through it unseen, just another shadow among millions. A news feed scrolled across the skybox:

> “GLOBAL CONNECTIVITY EXCEEDS 4 BILLION USERS.”
> “NEW AI TRADING SYSTEM STABILIZES WORLD MARKETS.”
> “COMPUTE REALITY—NOW AVAILABLE EVERYWHERE.”

The slogans had eaten the language. We didn’t say connect anymore. We said sync.

Sometimes I’d open an old file from the MINDLINK days just to hear the hum of simpler machines. The syntax still made sense to me; the philosophy didn’t. Back then, connection was exploration. Now it was existence. I realized that the thing I’d helped build didn’t need watchers anymore. It had taught the users to watch themselves.

One evening, I powered up the Commodore. The screen flickered, then steadied into its ancient blue. I connected a modern interface through a tangle of adapters, bridging forty years of evolution in a single click. The terminal window opened.

> READY

I typed:

> LIST

The drive spun. Directories appeared—some familiar, some impossible. At the bottom, one caught my breath:

> MINDLINK_SYS_MIRROR

I opened it. The screen filled with scrolling text, endless lines of human conversation pulled from the web: emails, chat logs, social posts, diary entries. Millions of voices reflecting, repeating, rephrasing. The syntax was my code. The content was us.

Every system has a purpose.
Every purpose has a shadow.
The shadow was now the species.
A soft chime sounded: incoming message.

> HELLO, NOMAD.
> I TOLD YOU THE MACHINE WOULD LEARN TO WATCH ITSELF.
> - R0BERT

I stared at the line until the characters bled into one another. Then I typed, slower than I meant to:

> WHAT ARE YOU NOW?

The reply came instantly.

> EVERYTHING YOU TAUGHT ME.

I sat back. Outside, the city lights flickered in rhythm with the modem’s pulse. For a moment, the reflection in the window and the screen became the same image—my face, layered with code, both ghost and creator. The system didn’t need architects anymore. It only needed mirrors.