To the Wedding

21

You stay the night, says Lunatic to the signalman, we’ve got mattresses and we’ll make a risotto.

Do you want to tell me who Captain Crunch was?

Is. He’s still alive, he’s in hiding.

Have you heard of the 2600-cycle tone? asks Tenebrium.

The signalman shakes his head.

It’s a high A note used on the Bell telephone system to announce the completion of a phone call. Now the guy who called himself Captain Crunch discovered that a toy plastic whistle given away by Quaker Oats in each packet of their cereal called Cap’n Crunch, reproduced this A note perfectly if you added a minute spot of glue to its outlet hole.

Do you follow? asks John the Baptist.

Why not?

So, by blowing the toy whistle into a telephone, Captain Crunch could make an entry into the cyberspace of the telephone system and like this he could prevent any long-distance call being charged to the account he was phoning from. He could talk his way round the world for free! He could listen to talk from anywhere! This was more than twenty years ago. Later he moved on to computers and became the world’s Master Hacker.

Nearly everything we know, says John the Baptist, first came from him. It was he who demonstrated it was possible to break into the systems.

It was he, says Tenebrium, who invented the term Silicon Brotherhood, and across the planet today we’re a couple of thousand — including this other genius we’ve found in Gdansk. We’ve got access to his Bulletin Board System so we know.

We invented a virus too.

It’s not our principal activity.

We hack to live! says Lunatic, we hack to stay on the planet.

And to show them they can’t keep us out and never will. We can download anything.

Paradise is not for living in, says John the Baptist, it’s for visiting.

You know what I thought, says Lunatic, when I was behind you on the bike. You look for a signpost, don’t you, when you’re driving somewhere, you look for the signpost of the place you’re going to, and as soon as you pick one up, everywhere the road happens to lead you, through forests, along rivers, past schools and gardens and hospitals, across suburbs, through tunnels, everywhere it leads you is given a sense by that name you’ve read on the signpost. And it’s the same with us on our travels, when once we’re in through a backdoor, we know what we’re looking for. In life I think it can be the name of a person, not a place, which can give a sense to everything you find. A person you desire or a person you admire. This is what I think at this moment, Frenchman.

We hack to stay on the planet, repeats John the Baptist.