'Oh.'
'Plus their favorite game used to be Donkey Kong.'
'What's that, a video game?'
He nodded. 'Pretty good one.'
We were at a snack bar in the bus terminal, where he'd insisted I meet him. I was drinking a cup of bad coffee and he was eating a hot dog and drinking a Pepsi. He said, 'Remember that dude Socks, we was watchin' him at the arcade? He 'bout the best there is, but he ain't nothin'
next to the Kongs. You know how a player is always tryin' to keep up with the machine? Kongs didn't have to keep up with it. They was always out ahead of it.'
'You brought me down here to meet a couple of pinball wizards?'
'Big difference between pinball and video games, man.'
'Well, I suppose there is, but—'
'But it ain't nothin' compared to the difference between video games an' where the Kongs is at now. I told you what happens to guys hang around the arcade, how you can get so good an' then there ain't no better for you to get? So you lose interest.'
'So you said.'
'What some dudes get interested in is computers. What I heard, the Kongs was into computers all along, fact they used a computer to stay ahead of the video games, know what the machine was gonna do before it could do it. You play chess?'
'I know the moves.'
'You an' me'll play a game sometime, see if you any good. You know those stone tables they got down by Washington Square? People bring their time clocks, study chess books while they waitin' to play? I play there sometimes.'
'You must be good.'
He shook his head. 'Some of those dudes,' he said, 'you play against them, it's like you tryin' to run a footrace standin' in water up to your waist. You can't get nowhere, 'cause they always five, six moves ahead of you in their mind.'
'Sometimes it feels like that in my line of work.'
'Yeah? Well, that's how video games got for the Kongs, they was five or six moves out in front. So they into computers, they what you call hackers. You know what that is?'
'I've heard the term.'
'Man, you want something from the phone company, you don't call no operator. Don't mess with no vice president, either. You call the Kongs. They get in the phones and crawl around in there, like the phone company's a monster and they swimmin' in its bloodstream. You know that picture, whatchacallit, Fantastic Voyage? They take a voyage in the phones.'
'I don't know,' I said. 'If an executive at the company can't figure out how to extract that data—'
'Man, ain't you listenin'?' He sighed, then sucked hard on his straw and drained the last of his Pepsi.
'You want to know what's happenin' on the streets, what's goin'
down on the Deuce or in the Barrio or in Harlem, who do you go and ask? The fuckin' mayor?'
'Oh,' I said.
'You see what I sayin'? They hangin' out on the streets of the phone company. You know Ma Bell? The Kongs be lookin' up her skirt.'
'Where are we going to find them? The arcade?'
'Told you. They lost interest some time ago. They come by once in a while just to see what's shakin', but they don't hang out there no more.
We ain't gonna find them. They gonna find us. I told 'em we'd be here.'
'How did you reach them?'
'How you think? Beeped 'em. Kongs ain't never too far from a phone. You know, that hot dog was good. You wouldn't think you'd get anything decent, place like this, but they give you a good hot dog.'
'Does that mean you want another?'
'Might as well. Take 'em some time to get here, and then they want to look you over before they come an' meet you. Want to satisfy themselves that you alone and that they can split in a hot second if they scared of you.'
'Why would they be scared of me?'
' 'Cause you might be some kind of cop workin' for the phone company. Man, the Kongs is outlaws!
Ma Bell ever gets her hands on them, she gone whip their ass.'
'THE thing is,' Jimmy Hong said, 'we have to be careful. People in suits are convinced that hackers are the biggest threat to corporate America since the Yellow Peril. The media is always running stories about what hackers could do to the system if we wanted to.'
'Destroying data,' David King said. 'Altering records. Wiping out circuitry.'
