Actually, Ellen Eckhouse couldn’t have cared less about bitmapped graphics on the Macintosh. The only reason she was in Mike O’Massey’s dorm room was Mike O’Massey.
“No, Ellen. See, the computer doesn’t really know that the letter A is an A. When you type the A key on your keyboard, the Mac just draws whatever bitmap happens to lie in the A slot in the font. But it wouldn’t have to look like an A, you know? I mean, it could be a bumblebee, or an X, or whatever the guy who made the font was thinking of.”
He looked at her, not quite in time to see her gaze shift from his clean, bespec-tacled face to the example he’d drawn on the Mac screen.
“Cool,” she said.
“That’s just fonts, of course. That’s when you’re using a word processor. When you’re doing other graphics, like a game or something, graphics are stored in the resource fork…here, where’s that game you brought me?”
Ellen snapped to attention. She’d brought him AirAttack as a surprise midterm gift. “Oh, here—” she said, picking up the floppy disk from the desk be-side Mike’s cool-looking rugby cleats.
Mike pushed the disk into the floppy drive.
“Have you played this much?” he asked, as he moved the cursor to the AirAttack program icon and clicked the mouse button twice.
“Yeah, I downloaded it from InfoServe last week,” she told him, hoping he’d be impressed by her modem prowess. “It’s cool. You’re defending this, like, guerrilla outpost against some heli-copters that keep flying in. And every so often there’s, you know, like a plane or something that you have to hit.”
Already the choppers were starting to flit across Mike’s screen, making a little digitized futtering sound.
“See, look, you press the Space bar when you want to shoot him, and you use the mouse to aim.”
Mike tried for a few minutes. Two of the choppers went spinning crazily to the bottom of the screen with a funny slide-whistle sound. One of them crashed onto the oak tree at the right side of the screen.
“I love that little oak tree,” Ellen said.
Mike didn’t say anything. He quit the game, opened the Utility Programs folder on his hard drive, and launched the Resource Editor.
“What’re you doing?” Ellen asked.
“OK, this is ResEdit. The Resource Editor. This is a utility program that lets you look inside whatever program you want. It’s neat, ‘cause you can change things in the program. Like you can rewrite what the menus say, and stuff like that. In high school I used to freak out the other kids in my Comp Sci class, ‘cause I’d change their menus to say stuff like— well, instead of File, Edit, View, and stuff, I’d make them say Puke, Belch, Snort, and stuff. They’d never know what hit ’em.”
Ellen laughed appreciatively, even though she didn’t quite get it.
“So here,” Mike went on. “I’ve opened up your AirAttack game. Look, see this resource? See how it’s labeled PICT? It stands for Pictures. That means this is the part of the program where all the little graphics are stored. Check this out. I’ll bet we find all the planes and helicopters and stuff in there.” He double-clicked the word PICT on the screen.
Sure enough, a scrolling window appeared, filled with small graphic images from AirAttack. “Cool,” said Mike. “Here’s the little bomb the plane drops, see? Here’s the helicopter—there’s four different pictures of it, with the rotors in dif-ferent positions. When it’s flying across the screen, the Mac is actually cycling really fast between these four pictures, so it looks like a little movie.”
“Cool,” said Ellen. Mike clicked the scroll bar to see more pictures.
“Whoa!” said Mike. He stared at the screen.
“What?” Ellen leaned in to see what he was looking at. Next to the last helicopter image was the little oak tree. But next to the oak tree was something she’d never seen before in the program: a tiny Christmas tree, com-pletely with all the trimmings, and miniature wrapped presents at its base.
“Where’d that come from?” she said.
“I don’t know! That’s neat,” said Mike. “Sometimes the guys who write these things hide little surprises. I wonder what you have to do to make that Christmas tree show up when you’re playing? Hey, let’s see something.” He quit ResEdit and launched the game again.
“You probably have to do something Christmasy,” he said.
He tried typing Xmas, Christmas, Noel…nothing happened. He tried clicking the oak tree. Nothing.
Ellen had an idea. “Hey, maybe the Christmas tree appears if you play the game on Christmas?”
Mike shook his head. “No, that’s impossible. How would the game know if it was Chr— Hey, wait, I bet you’re right! The game could check your Mac’s clock! You know how the Mac has an internal clock? I bet the game just checks the date every time you run the program. Let’s see.”
Mike opened the Mac’s Control Panel. Clicking the date icon, he changed the Mac clock to say 12/25/93. He closed the Control Panel.
“Oh, cool!” said Mike and Ellen simultaneously. Where the oak tree had stood on the screen a moment earlier, the little Christmas tree now grew.
“That’s cool,” said Mike, looking at Ellen appreciatively. She felt a surge of pride.
“Hey, we should send this in to the Mac magazines,” he said to her. “They pay you money for stuff like this.”
“We’ll split it, how’s that?” said Ellen. “And how about if I spend mine taking you out for dinner some night?” She put out her hand in mock businessman fashion.
When he took it, Ellen forgot all about bitmapped graphics.
 
Figures, Gam thought with a glance at the clock. Danny Cooper, the New Yorker with Something to Prove, is the last of the braindead hirees to leave.
If Gam were the type to show his emotions, he might have grinned: in less than two weeks, he had successfully established a reign of control over his new subordinates. They were older, they were stupider, but they were already com-pletely terrified. For the millionth time in his life, Gam marveled at how easy it was to establish control over another human being.
Power: the mutually accepted illusion of authority.
He snapped off his hard drive and began to unplug it from the back of his Macintosh SCSI port.
Before leaving the R & D lab, he took a glance at the calendar on the wall. October 5. That meant about three months before the Master Voice software was supposed to be completed, polished, and “frozen” into its final state. Then, after four weeks of user’s manual-binding, packaging, and shipping, tens of thousands of copies would be sent out. On February first.
Too bad they’re not gonna make that date. Never yet happened in the software biz, never would; they’d missed their deadlines twice already. Too many things crop up when you’re working on a new program. Someone’ll find a bug at the last minute. There will be a delay at the plant where the manuals are printed. And even if everything goes perfectly smoothly, then there’s still…
No, no, no. I’m supposed to keep my secret secret. Gam smiled.
He studied his hard drive as he listened to its fan’s whine die away. It was the size, shape, and weight of a bible. The only break from its corporate grayness—“platinum,” the brochures called it—was a now-dark LED disk-access indicator lamp. Yep, thar she blows: 80 megabytes of my soul. My Rolodex, my business, my life.
Then he grabbed the drive with one hand, his gym bag with the other, and stepped out of the R & D lab. The lights, heat-activated, shut them-selves off a moment later.
Artelligence was eerie at night—eerie and yet somehow liberating. It reminded Gam of his high school, when he used to break in in the middle of the night to use the computer lab. In the darkened, locker-lined hallways, illuminated only by the light bridges in the trophy cases, he was simultaneously terrified that he’d be caught and giddy with the possibilities of being alone in the building. The Artelligence building was only slightly different at night. It had the same de-serted, anything-is-possible calm, and it, too, was spookily dark—only the fluorescent accent lights along the tops of the hall walls were on. But this time, Gam wasn’t breaking any rules by being there.
At least not that Artelligence knew of.
He made his way to the only unlocked exit, the receptionist’s console at the front entrance. Damn. Hugo, the old, black, bald night security man, was uncharacteristically awake and at the front entrance. It was too late to shove the drive into the bag.
“‘lo, Hugo my man,” said Gam as he approached the desk.
Hugo glanced at Gam’s hard drive. “Hello, Gam. What that you takin’ home tonight?” There was a Jamaican ring to his accent.
Gam reached into his back jeans pocket. Well, won’t be the first time for this old charade.
“Too hard to explain, Hugo my man,” he said. He pulled out his wallet.
This guy’s got one reason for being here—to keep me from walk-ing out with my hard drive—and a $20 bill shuts him up. Power is the illusion…
He creased the bill and jammed it into Hugo’s shirt pocket.
“Why, thank you, Mr. Lampert. I guess it really ain’t my business, is it now?” He grinned his wide, gaptoothed grin.
“G’night, Hugo. Don’t spend it all on one bottle.” Gam pushed through the heavy glass doors and walked toward his Maserati.
Less than an hour later, he kicked open the kitchen door of his Woodside house. Periwinkle Lane wasn’t anything like the winding, steeply-inclined streets that were higher up the mountainside community known as Woodside; as such, it didn’t seat any of the sprawling mansions of the super-wealthy that dotted the upper portions of the hill. Still, it was plenty large for the two people who lived there, and its elegance and landscaping fit right in with the rest of the affluent little suburb.
The lights in the house were out. He passed through the kitchen and took the stairway two steps at a time. As he walked down the hall toward his room, he passed her door. It was closed. The shag carpet was too thick for him to tell if the light was on in her room or not. He briefly considered calling her name to see if she was still up, but thought the better of it.
She’ll find me if she wants me, God knows.
His own door was open; a faint bluish light spilled out onto the hallway carpet. He laid the gym bag on his desk, took off his windbreaker, closed the door. It was a cocoon, the way he wanted it. Dark, cluttered, and windowless—he had long since pan-eled over the room’s solitary window—its only illumination, at this moment, was the Tensor lamp on his desk. It gave the desktop a stark, command-post look.
The high-tech aura was further enhanced by the perfectly symmet-rical row of three color monitors, the plane of their screens at a right angle to Gam’s desk. Each was attached to its own top-of-the-line Macintosh Quadra, their mice spaced equidistant on three identical mouse pads. Gam had named the three computers Hitler, Hussein, and Quayle.
He leaned back in his swiveling desk chair, the glow of Hussein’s monitor lending an eerie cast to the contours of his face. It was going to be a busy night for Gam’s modems; if it weren’t that a bank in San Francisco unwittingly paid his phone bills, Pacific Bell would be collecting quite a bit from him.
He launched his telecom program and dialed the Artelligence mainframe; part of Gam’s nightly ritual was to check for any electronic mail that had been sent during the day. To me or anyone, he thought to himself.
After making the connec-tion to the mainframe, the computer prompted him.
Your name?
Gam typed Robert Stroman.
Your password?
It normally would have taken Gam some time to figure out his employer’s password. Gam’s favorite method was simply to watch over people’s shoulders as they typed; he learned over time that, incredibly, nine out of ten people used their own first names as their passwords. A few even used PASSWORD as a password.
For the few that made up something more creative, Gam had to have patience and hope that the password was an easily-remembered word, and not a hard-to-watch random combination of letters and numbers. He was rarely disappointed.
But Gam hadn’t had much oppor-tunity to hang out in Stroman’s office, which was three hallways away from the R & D lab; when he first started working at Artelligence, days went by before Gam realized he’d never be able to watch Stroman enter his password. Fortunately, Stroman’s password had been simple to determine. Like most people, Stroman didn’t consider Artelligence’s E-mail system a particular security risk; his password was MARGO, his wife’s name. Gam had guessed it on his fourth try.
Tonight, Gam read through the various messages in Stroman’s mailbox. Evidently Stroman had left the office early, because there was a handful of mail he hadn’t yet read. Something from Arnie, something from marketing. Gam loved this; not only could he intercept any messages that concerned himself, but he got to see them before Stroman did. He was even working on a way to edit them before the messages reached their recipients.
Something from accounting. Something from tech support.
Something from Michelle.
 
Gam read the note twice. Too early for me, Michelle baby. He signed off from the system. He’d never yet uncovered anything worrisome perusing people’s E-mail, but it was important to be vigilant.
And, of course, it was part of the contract.
He remembered having spotted an envelope from National Pacific Trust in the mail; he ran downstairs to the kitchen table, picked it up, and returned to his desk. He tore open the envelope.
It was a confirmation of the account he’d just opened. What a deal. I de-posit twenty bucks, you suckers send me an account number. Hope that money’s useful to you, ‘cause the account number is sure going to be useful to me!
He quit the telecommunications program he’d been using. From his top desk drawer, he pulled out the DirectLink disk. He slipped it into Hussein’s floppy disk drive and copied the DirectLink program to his hard disk. Showtime, folks. He double-clicked the DirectLink icon to launch the program.
Welcome to
D I R E C T • L I N K™
Your home-banking connection to National Pacific Trust
Press <Return> to continue
Gam pressed Return. The “wait-a-minute” wristwatch cursor appeared on his screen as the program dialed the bank. From the modem’s one-inch speaker, he could hear the rapid dialing tones, like a Touch-Tone phone gone mad.
Step One, of course, was going to be easy: Gam needed to find another bank customer’s legitimate account number. Preferably someone with mucho money—although the pleasure, of course, was in the pursuit.
He looked up at his screen when the whine/hiss sequence of the modem connecting with another modem was complete.
Dialing National Pacific…
Connecting…
Confirming connection protocol…
Connection complete!
Please enter your account number:
Aw, too easy! He entered the first eleven digits of his new account number. Knowing perfectly well that these account numbers were dis-tributed in sequential order, he changed the final digit of the account number from a 9 to a 2. Let’s see who this poor sap is.
Welcome, Paul Takishima
Gam’s heart was pounding faster. Here he sat, master of somebody else’s destiny…somebody helpless and unsuspecting.
Please enter your Personal Identification Number:
OK, what’s your PIN, you chump? Intense and charged, Gam snatched the litera-ture he’d been sent by the bank and rapidly scanned it. How many digits were there in this PIN? He couldn’t find any reference to it; all the brochure said was, “And, if you have a personal computer and a modem, you can ac-cess your own account 24 hours a day from your own home. Transfer funds, pay bills, check your account balance, with National Pacific’s DirectLink Home Banking Service.”
Fine. Gonna make this harder for me, aren’t you? We’ll see, you losers.
He typed 123456789, and pressed Return.
Sorry, your Personal Identification Number must be between 4 and 6 digits long. Please try again:
Why, thank you, Gam thought triumphantly; precisely what I needed to know. He signed off from the service and quit the DirectLink program. Do not pass go, do not collect $200, go straight to Quick Pascal.
Within twenty minutes, Gam had written a program. He named it Guesser. Crude, dumb, and with almost no interface at all, it had only one main routine: to transmit 0000, check for acceptance from a remote modem; transmit 0001, check for acceptance; and so on up to 999999. Not too tough.
He launched it simultaneously with DirectLink, entered Paul whatsisname’s account number, and switched to his Guesser program. Let’s roll.
Please enter your Personal Identification Number: 0000
Sorry, that’s incorrect. Please try again: 0001
Sorry, that’s incorrect. Please try again: 0002
Invalid password.
Thank you for using DirectLink‚Ñ¢.
Disconnect
+++
Oh, so we think we’re clever, do we? Gam’s eyes were shining with the pleasure of the hunt. So it’s three guesses before you dump me off the system. Hey, that’s OK; I’ve got three Macs, three modems, and all night.
He thought a moment, then opened one of the three wall-to-ceiling closet doors that formed one end of his room. He pulled out a box of equipment and extracted two older modems.
He disconnected the laser printer from his computers, and hooked up the modems to the printer ports. Let’s get serious here. I’ll run two copies of DirectLink, under System 7; one will dial out on the printer port, and one on the modem port. This way, he figured, he’d be able to try 24 combinations per minute instead of 12. Hell, it’s just a hobby.
By the time Gam went to sleep, all three computers were furiously redialing National Pacific Trust. Paul Takishima, a tax preparer in LA, could not have known that he was the unlucky recipient of Gam Lampert’s attention.
