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  On disassembly, the code revealed some complicated voice pattern comparison routines and she could not be bothered to carefully analyse them while she was online, so instead she inserted breakpoints before and after every likely-looking branch statement. After a few restarts, she had found where in the program the decision was made. Any sample with over 84% resemblance was allowed to continue, anything else was dumped off-line.

  She poked over the address containing her meagre 1%, with 87% (enough to be admitted but not too much so as to arouse suspicion) and restarted the program.

  It said "Welcome Mr. Sedgwick. Please choose one of the following options:" These were a sight for sore eyes. The last option particularly caught Karen's mischievous eye; the one which read "Input new voice specimen."

  Karen chose this and fetched a digital alarm clock from the other room. Once sampling had started, she held down the alarm button to record the beeping tone. This was a tone she could easily reproduce in the future with no further need to use the trapper. It was accepted and Karen returned to the latest menu, happier now that entry would be a much easier affair.

  She was in. It was a great feeling.

  Karen dabbed at F1, impatiently wishing the screen to update quicker. She couldn't wait to see how much Sedgwick had unintentionally left her.

  Two hundred and fifty-one thousand, two hundred and seventy-one Sterling! It was far, far more than she ever expected Sedgwick could have saved. She stared at the screen in astonishment. Fortune smiled at last. It was all hers for the taking - every last penny.

  She had to channel this away into a separate account, one that nobody could trace to her. The police could block Sedgwick's account at any moment and she had to make her move immediately.

  She reluctantly left this account and opened a new account in a different building society, miles away. She didn't want it to even appear local - she wasn't going to have to physically travel there anyway.

  She applied to open another kind of `valued customer account' and soon faced a screen of questions to answer. She hurried through them, falsifying every answer so as to seem the rich saver they hungered for, and as such the application was duly accepted.

  Soon she was transferring a massive quarter of a million from Sedgwick's about-to-be-closed account into her new easily-accessible-and hopefully-untraceable account. She transferred a couple of hundred of this from here into her own everyday account and congratulated herself as the "Transaction completed" response appeared on the screen. Would it all really be as easy as this?

  Now what could she do with that remaining twelve-hundred or so? She felt she ought to let somebody else have it.

  More urgently, she had to put a stop to being burgled again. Her damaged door served as an invitation to further intrusion.

  She may have had no idea who the perpetrator was, but she knew he would not survive another burglary. She was going to protect herself.

  She rummaged around in the various boxes of junk that lay in her spare room behind her chair and tipped out the contents of a garden strimmer box, so the contents scattered on the floor. Amongst them was her old clarinet case.

  She placed it on her lap, flipped up the two catches and inside was no clarinet. It had been replaced by a pistol, a silencer and a detachable shoulder rest. Under the plastic surround there was also a full box of high-velocity ammunition.

  Shooting burglars may not have been its original function, but it would fulfil the purpose well enough.

  A Little Mischief

  Simon and Jeff trundled around the streets on their mountain bikes, scouring their estate for a telco ground cabinet. These cabinets are where all the individual fibres meet before converging into a single thick cable which in turn goes to the exchange. This was where lines could be tapped, swapped, added or taken away, a prospect which Simon found somewhat appealing.

  After a short search they found such a cabinet, but were soon disheartened to find just how secure the cabinet was - a dull grey, cast iron box, locked (if not rusted) firmly shut. The lock was of an unusual kind, possibly exclusive to the telco, which opened with a special tool as opposed to a key. The hole was so tiny and so obviously unpickable Simon and Jeff returned home discouraged if not yet entirely thwarted.

  Simon had dreamed up another more elaborate and more daring wangle to further carry out his wheeze; more daring for Jeff anyway.

  That following morning at school, Simon spun yet another web of lies to a supply teacher to get him out of chemistry and into the school library. When he found his usual, tyrannical teacher replaced with a heaven-sent, soppy, supply teacher, Simon seized the chance and duly bunked off. Titration was hardly exciting at the best of times.

  Minutes later, Simon was in the relative privacy of the school library and took the Yellow Pages into the private study room. This room was usually occupied by everyone writing out their own sick notes out of the librarian's direct sight, but fortunately today it was empty.

  Simon was looking for the name of anyone who lived in or near Malin Street where the telco ground cabinet was situated. He knew of a fish and chip shop nearby, found the correct one and wrote down the address and phone number. The advert gave the name of the proprietor so he noted this down too.

  Having found the information he had come for, and realising the library was still mostly unoccupied, Simon decided he didn't fancy rugby on the frozen grass today and so wrote himself a note - his sixth since rugby started only eight weeks ago.

  When Simon arrived home from school that afternoon, he decided to give the phone company a call. Time was of the essence and he needed to get inside Dreamland before some other hacker beat him to it.

  Taking Jeff somewhat for granted, Simon figured that if he called the complaints line on his videophone, they would see visually he wasn't who he claimed to be, so he had to lie about the video circuits at his end not working correctly as a reason for giving no picture. He could even give this as his reason for complaint thus killing two birds with one stone.

  He leaned a book over the camera's lens and called the phone company's complaints line.

  A patronising secretary promptly answered and after he explained in his most pompous voice about the problem he was supposedly having, she suggested that he should clean the lens and see if that cured it. He told her he was no idiot, there was no picture at all and that she should get an engineer to visit sharpish and fix it.

  She was hesitant and Simon was getting agitated as the sky outside was becoming darker; much longer and the engineers would leave it until tomorrow, when he would be at school.

  Fortunately she conceded and an engineer was soon on his way.

  Simon had just enough time to meet Jeff and collect their bikes again.

  At the Malin Street ground cabinet, two teenage lads were riding their bikes over a nearby ramp - a plank and a few bricks - daring one another to jump better than before... faster... higher... further...

  End Over End

  The apathetic telephone engineer had not long arrived when some kids came along, distracting and annoying him further with the frequent crash landing sound of their buckling rims.

  He was not fond of being called out so near to the end of his working day and he viewed the customer's fault with the indifference expected from someone in his situation. It was becoming so dark he could barely see the numbers on the boards. The awesome complexity of the wiring and optical fibres disheartening him from the very outset, in boxes designed for the 1960s but somehow still in operation. How was he expected to find where one single connection was slightly loose? He would just have to say that the...

  The loud smash of a mountain bike crashing into the door of his van interrupted his train of thought. The van's back door had swung open from above the road to over the pavement where the two kids were riding. He hadn't closed the van door properly and it had been opened (presumably by the wind) so that it overhung the pavement in the path of their landing. Jeff clambered to his feet and was met by the engineer
sympathetically asking whether he was alright. Jeff held his nose up with one hand as blood dripped down his arm.

  Simon quietly slipped over to around the cabinet, took the custom key out of the keyhole and slid it up his sleeve. He then went over to Jeff and offered to help him home. Simon seemed not to be as concerned as the engineer who was visibly shaken; partly by the apparent severity of Jeff's crash and partly due to his own contribution towards causing it.

  Jeff limped away with Simon pushing both bikes, calling out something about being more "careful with your van doors". Simon offered Jeff a screwed-up tissue and congratulatingly said:

  "I didn't know you brought a blood capsule. Nice touch."

  "I didn't." mumbled Jeff.

  Patchwork

  Later that evening, Simon and Jeff returned to the scene. Jeff rode his mountain bike rather more slowly than before and struggled to keep up with Simon whose eagerness was getting the better of him.

  Simon opened the cabinet with the stolen key and gazed inside with fascination. Jeff remained on his bike, feeling whether his teeth still wobbled from his earlier accident. His enthusiasm for this ruse was beginning to wane considerably.

  Simon unrolled the documents he kept down his jacket, looked at them and prodded at connections, navigating his way around the board. Taking out the small screwdriver he always carried, he loosened the fastening screw until the wire dangled. This he swapped with the wire leading to his own house so that his phone would temporarily take on the number of the disconnected phone.

  He had effectively patched his number to that of the chip shop that the engineer was called out for. The shop would be closed by now and he could probably use their line for the night without the possibility of any comeback.

  With this number he could pretend to be the vice-president of Virtual Reality Developments by swapping the chip shop's number in the telco's exchange computer with that of the vice-president until he had obtained a password and clearance from Dreamland enabling him illegal and unlimited access to their system.

  He would do this by ringing Dreamland's SysOp, asking for a high-level clearance password by posing as the vice-president of VRD (a subsidiary company) and pretending that their own system had been infiltrated so the 'locks' needed changing.

  Before this he would call the telco exchange, change the chip shop's number to that of the vice-president's in case Dreamland's SysOp should call back to verify his identity. Once they had done this, he would come back to the cabinet and restore the wiring as if it had never been touched, leaving the key tool in the long grass in case the engineer returned.

  In doing all of this he would obtain a user ID and password of his own to use at will. The real VRD vice-president would still have his own password and not suspect it had been tampered with while Simon called and hacked Dreamland to his heart's content. If Dreamland suspected anything, (which they could well do as they were a prime target for hackers,) they would only be able to trace him as far as the chip shop number which wasn't his real number anyway. He had every angle covered.

  "Are you finished yet? I'm getting cold and I've already had a nosebleed thanks to you." Jeff interrupted Simon's delusions of grandeur with his whingeing.

  "Yeah, yeah. I'm shutting the doors now." Simon passed the blame onto Jeff. "You weren't meant to fall off quite so convincingly. You were only meant to do a gentle endo like we planned. Don't blame me if you had to go and overdo it. Come on, we've got some phone calls to make."

  Simon jumped back on his bike and rolled down the hill before Jeff was ready to follow. Jeff mumbled something inaudible about wanting to go home.

  Warning!

  Karen logged on to the Internet intending to find what she could buy with the information she had on gaining entry to the building society. She wanted to use the lure of Sedgwick's remaining money to entice hackers from all around to break in, in doing so drowning her entry in a sea of calls, reducing the likelihood of her ever being traced. She had all the money she needed from his account, now all she wanted was anonymity.

  When she logged on, a message immediately appeared:

  "Warning to all users of the Net!

  A dentist's system has allegedly been damaged by a new breed of virus, causing extensive data corruption. This new and extremely devious virus claims to have been written by a green eco-warrior who intends it to attack larger systems and mainframes.

  [Home users need not worry as it appears to test the size of your computer and records the response times to specific calculations. If the memory is large or the processor unusually quick, it assumes the host is a major installation and destroys everything within its locality. ]

  It seems this virus is a self-replicating limpet which attaches itself to any one of your files. It contains no constant information and it apparently uses some of your own data as its encryption key. It is extremely cunning and is 'sticky' even once detected. It is difficult to remove absolutely every trace of. The payload is a particularly potent and destructive one.

  Any further information would be gratefully received.

  Take heed and beware when downloading!"

  It soon dawned on Karen that the virus she had blamed on young Harry's pirated game may well have already been present on her own hard disk before he had even visited. She bought her computer cheaply from Psi and as it was of military specifications, it would be prone to attack from this virus which could have remained dormant for any length of time. She may even have caught it from Psi initially.

  This in turn meant that whoever had stolen her hard drive would almost certainly have caught a copy of this virus too. Furthermore, if the virus did hide itself in limpet form (attached to a genuine file) anyone that the data was passed on to was also likely to catch it. It pleased her to think that these thieves were about to get at least some sort of comeuppance, if not quite as severe as the one she intended to deal them.

  Heeding the warning, Karen cruised around her usual cyber 'haunts' but it was early yet - these people never log on until around midnight. She would have to come back later.

  Think Plunger

  Hundreds of miles away in another electronics laboratory, not too dissimilar to Psi's (only without quite such vast funding), a team of digital microengineers beavered away in vain at Dreamland's newest innovation.

  Dreamland had been the mainstay of the video games industry in recent years, at the forefront of every new development and invention. But times had become hard, the competition was hotting up, catching up. With 70000 CPUs becoming the standard, the boundaries of technology were inching forward at an ever-slower rate. Virtual reality was great while it lasted, the novelty of all that it brought was a fantastic selling point - but only while it lasted.

  Like all novelties, it wore off. Consumers began to realise they needed more from a game than the old two-dimensional games rehashed in 3D. Interactive video games were only as interactive as the programmers made them, opponents were only as intelligent as they were programmed to be. Artificial intelligence heuristics had not kept up with the advances made in every other area of computing, leaving much to be desired in the other participants' 'thinking.' In short, the other characters in your cyberspace did what they were told to do by the programmers, not by the player.

  Dreamland along with every other video games designer, needed to come up with a way where the other characters could find and know your weaknesses, your desires, your fears. Immediately everyone would become more lifelike, more realistic and most importantly - more challenging and in turn more addictive and marketable.

  Dreamland had to charge a fortune for every games release to recoup the vast development costs incurred in writing them. Loss to piracy was negligible nowadays, but games players were still reluctant to pay large sums for games they either finished or became bored with within a week. They had seen them all before anyway and gradually software houses were seeing their profits dwindle.

  They all knew what was needed; a semi-intelligent cerebral readin
g system which could at least understand the player's most basic thoughts and act on them. Any company which invented such a system would surely take the market by storm and kill off all opposition in a single stroke. If only Dreamland knew how to make one...

  Dreamland had made a feasibility study of such a system and poured all their resources into the project, codenamed Think Plunger, but progress was dismally slow and the R & D department were beginning to flounder as each new approach dried up. Morale was at an all-time low.

  It was this stubborn project that they were struggling with at present when their prayers were suddenly answered.

  Two of the project team leaders were called in to a private office and handed a carrier bag containing various components to what looked like might once have been some kind of helmet. They were told that Dreamland had 'acquired' this package and to go and analyse it from every angle for new ideas.

  They were informed that this helmet came from a company working on a similar project which had failed, but the resulting apparatus performed sufficiently successfully to still be of use to Dreamland, albeit limited use.

  On opening the bag, the two technicians were horrified to find how much damage had been done in transit - obviously by someone with little knowledge of how such fragile cards should be treated. No precautions against static had ever been taken. There was also a hard drive inside, but on installment this too revealed plenty of corruptions in the data.

  They backed-up the disk, salvaged and repaired it, guessed missing parts, disassembled it, read it, assembled it, debugged it and assembled it some more - every night that week. It really was a most tiresome chore, but soon they understood at least the gist of the code's structure. It was a hazy, vague sort of gist, but some idea nonetheless.

  Some vitally important modules were completely missing however and word got around how impossibly difficult their task was without at least some outside help from those in the know. And that was just the software side of the operation - the hardware side looked even less fruitful.