Hacker's Memory

Another day in Newport... another cold, rainy, hopeless day. Just another day, just another hack.

I'd been on my way home from a trip to the softs store to pick up some stuff I'd special ordered the week before. Through the crowded subways, past the misty-eyed 'net junkies and their neural feeds... past the invisible corporate security that endlessly patrolled the streets. The streets of the real world and the endless cyber streets that formed the global 'net. It was a simple enough walk... fifty linear kilometers, only about three on foot. After I'd gotten back topside I got to my apartment pretty fast... if you live like I do you learn to get off the streets as fast as you can if there are no corpers around.

No one was waiting for me when I got home, as usual. As usual, expected, and preferred. I hadn't had a visitor in three years, and even then she wasn't worth the 100 credits I'd paid for her. It wasn't so much that she wasn't worth it as it was that the experience did nothing for me. She’d just stripped down to her gorgeous ass when her boyfriend calls... her boyfriend! It just wasn't the same when I knew I was fucking someone's girl, not just a cheap hooker off the street.

Anyway, I got home that day to an empty apartment and a refrig unit full of half spoiled food. I got the apartment because it was cheap, in a fairly quiet ghetto of Newport, and it had an old untapped high-speed line running into the building. A three-room apartment in a run-down building on the thirty-third floor was all it really was to me, but it was home so I guess that counts for something. A home with a top of the line computer sporting a third generation neural interface...

After I settled in and installed the new apps I'd picked up, I went on a test run into SigCorp's central mainframe. Sigma was a subsidiary of TetraCorp at the time, so they had some of the best network security around. Most people couldn't even hope to get into those systems... but I'm not most people. The test run was pretty simple... most networks have a login option that few know about, buried under a few million lines of code, that allows complete access to all the network's systems but without any rights of any kind. No read, write, copy, share, anything... but if you're good enough you can find the security you're up against and how to disable it. I ran a search through all the administrative systems for any security of any kind... feedback generators, generated password detectors, backdoor guard dog softs, anything. SigCorp's layout didn't surprise me much. The usual password sniffers, a feedback pulse soft behind the primary firewall for any unsuspecting amateur to fry their brains against. What di d surprise me was that there was no r/w verification program running on the server to keep people like me using the backdoor to silently break in, download the data, and get out before a single alarm tripped. Just for the hell of it, I tried to look at some file's contents, but to no end... I remember the server rebuffing me very loudly and dumping me back to a command prompt warning me that, "Your viewing rights have been exhausted. Please contact your administrator to gain more rights."

I remember frantically searching down the network path I'd used for any traces, but they all came up negative. The server was using an integrated protocol for verifying system r/w rights, but nothing more ominous than that. When I hacked in later that night, I was coming in through the front door as an admin anyway, so it wouldn't matter... at least I thought it wouldn't matter.