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Eric padded back and forth across the cold, concrete floor. A single, long life, neon light bulb swung lazily overhead, causing the shadows to sway back and forth mysteriously. Spitting out a chewed fingernail fragment, he could no longer take the anticipation of waiting for his friend's ineptitude to be revealed.
"Would you please tell me what you're trying to achieve?"
Bob looked away from the green lettering on the screen and adjusted his eyes to the relative illumination, everything taking on a strange shade of pink for a moment. "I am hacking."
Eric sighed. "Dude, you are typing in random IP addresses."
Bob turned back to the screen. "Exactly," he said whilst keying in another six byte code. "One of them has got to be open."
Eric walked to the computer and turned a dial on the monitor, bringing the screen back to white text on a black background. "Why do you feel this burning desire to look like Steve Wozniak? Green cathode ray tubes on computers haven't been used since the seventies."
Bob flicked the screen back to green on black and shrugged. "So?"
Eric's anger rose. "The nineteen seventies."
Bob hit the enter key for another six byte address and turned to his partner in crime. "So what? If this was good enough for the grandfathers of hacking it's good enough for me!"
Eric sat down again. "I think security is a little more complex these days."
Bob stood up. "Eric, my dear friend, WE are a little more complex these days. Do you know where we are currently standing?"
Eric muttered something under his breath.
Bob took a step closer. "I'm sorry, what was that?"
Eric looked Bob in the eye. "Your father's garage."
Bob spewed random syllables in sheer anger for three seconds before managing to blurt out, "I meant the moon, you retard!"
"Sorry, man. I thought this was another of these 'it's my garage and I'm not asking you to stay' speeches."
Bob held his hands skyward to emphasise a point. "We are products of the lunar age! The low gravity increases our intelligence. I read that on the open university."
Eric rolled his eyes. "I'm just saying you could use a program to automate that. At the moment you're testing one port every ten seconds. You could have scanned half the Internet in that time if you used a scanning program."
Bob sat back down. "But this, Eric, this is the core of hacking. I use only my own intelligence. Not like those wannabe hackers who just get port grabbers from the undernet and pretend to be Captain Crunch or something."
Eric sat forward. "If you're so smart write your own port grabber."
Bob shook his head lazily, "Can't be bothered."
Laughing, his friend stood up and approached him, placing his left hand on the hacker's shoulder. "Robert, it's just a linear iterative algorithm. Ten lines of code, tops. You could write it in anything. Basic, Pascal, C, X, Java, Assembler, Cobol, raw binary, Lunix, Prolog, Fortran, SCheM, even a batch file. Are you telling me that you can't be bothered to write ten lines of code? Are you really that lazy? Or is it in fact the case that you, Robert Maxwell Gates, son of one of the three most prominent computing brains on Earth or the Moon are unable to actually code anything in any language at all?"
Bob gritted his teeth and seethed in rage as he turned round and shouted at the top of his voice, "My name is SToRMiX_BitWARz!"
Eric sat back down again muttering, "Whatever, Stormic buttwipe."
Bob lifted himself from his chair. "How am I supposed to work in this atmosphere?" He grunted, leaping into the air and batting the light bulb with his heat-calloused fingers.
"And why does the light bulb have to be swinging anyway?"
The hacker sat back down. "It just does. Atmosphere is the key."
Silence reigned for ten whole minutes while Bob entered more and more codes into the computer. Then after his fifty-sixth, Bob sat up straight. "I've got one."
Eric leapt across the room. "What? Where?"
"It's at 193.45.62.120.23.215, port 6852. It's asking me for a password."
"Well, give it one."
Bob attempted one. Upon his failure he tried another. Then another. Failing that he sat back.
"Well, it's got me."
"What did you try?"
Bob gestured to the screen. "God, Love and Sex. The three most popular passwords."
Eric looked puzzled. "Where did you hear that?"
Bob pulled a printout from under the trolley his computer was set up on.
His friend eyed it over sceptically. "The anarchist's cookbook, extracts from 2600 magazine. Bob, this belongs in a history archive. You don't think that maybe over the last eighty years people might just have wised up to this stuff?"
Bob smiled. "Computers get smarter, people stay dumb."
"But you just said that the low gravity - "
Bob stood up, "Oh, I'd like to see you do better."
Eric pushed him aside and sat before the computer, reverting it to normal colour mode and closing down the prompt box to reveal the pleasantly coloured window environment of Linux NT Platinum Edition. A few screen touches and five lines of text later he had a scanner rooting through the Internet.
Bob stared at the screen dumbfounded. "How did you - "
"I realised I could speed it up by doing it recursively. Less lines of code too. Here we are."
Quickly a list appeared on screen of open ports and a few moments later Eric was password-cracking them against the dictionary file of Bob's word processor. Soon the list widened to include passwords and entry codes.
Bob stared at the screen dumbfounded. "How... I mean... you just..."
Eric activated a data scanner and blankly answered, "Must be the low gravity."
"But you... I mean... where did you learn to do that?"
Eric sat back and smiled. "I like to think of it as a strange irony that the son of InterSoft's chairman knows as much about computers as a trained chimp whilst his friend, son of a humble mineworker, is a prodigy of the information age."
"Are those like... government machines?"
"Not a chance, you think they would use dictionary passwords? This is a selection of home computers belonging to what I like to call BBBBs."
Bob batted the lightbulb and sat behind Eric. "BBBB?"
"Blonde, Beautiful, Barely-computer-literate Bimbos. Obviously you also find the occasional unimaginative pensioner but most people know better."
Bob licked his lips and sat forward. "Can we get... photos?"
Eric said, "Better than that. I'm scanning for which of these ladies have used their looks to purchase Sensies and live out peculiar fantasies. Those coming out on the final lists are running them right now."
The computer made a pleasant jingle to signify its state of completedness.
Bob hurried to the computer, grabbing hold of the CICI plug, moving towards his head before Eric grabbed his wrist.
"How stupid are you, Bob?"
Bob pulled his hand free, the resulting tension pulling the wire out of the computer. "We've just tracked these babies down, I want in." He scrambled to the floor and plugged the cable back into the computer, grappling with Eric to plug the other side into his own head.
Eventually he punched his friend in the nose and used the moment of freedom to stick it in his head and hit the connect key on screen. He closed his eyes and waited.
Nothing happened.
Looking down, he saw Eric with the computer's electrical plug in his hand, sat beside the wall socket.
"Bob, we just broke five computer laws. You were about to sexually assault someone's brain. Do you have any idea of the penalty for that? Not to mention the possibility of the host computer finding you and squikking you for security purposes."
Bob pulled the wire from his head. "Well then, what's the point?"
"There isn't one. What I can do and what I actually do are two different things. You should learn that."
Eric stood up and walked out of the garage. "Think about what happened tonight, Bob."
Bob leapt into the air to bat the bulb, "That's SToRMiX_BitWARz, you big f-"
The bulb exploded onto his hand.
Pete Smith,25/08/01
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