'It makes a good story, but they lose sight of the fact that we never pull that shit. They think we're going to put dynamite on the railroad tracks when all we're doing is hitching a free ride.'
'Oh, every once in a while some nitwit introduces a virus—'
'But most of that isn't hackers, it's some jerk with a grudge against a company or somebody introducing a glitch into the system by using bootleg software.'
'The point is,' David said, 'Jimmy's too old to take chances.'
'Turned eighteen last month,' Jimmy Hong said.
'So if they catch us he'll be tried as an adult. That's if they go by chronological age, but if they take emotional maturity into account—'
'Then David would go scot-free,' Jimmy said, 'because he hasn't reached the age of reason.'
'Which came between the Stone Age and the Iron Age.'
Once they decided they trusted you, you couldn't get them to shut up. Jimmy Hong was around six-two, long and lean, with straight black hair and a long, saturnine face. He wore aviator sunglasses with amber lenses, and after we'd been sitting together for ten or fifteen minutes he changed them for a pair of horn-rimmed glasses with round untinted lenses, altering his appearance from hip to studious.
David King was no more than five-seven, with a round face and red hair and a lot of freckles. Both of them wore Mets warmup jackets and chinos and Reeboks, but the similarity of dress wasn't enough to make them look like twins.
If you closed your eyes, though, you might have been fooled. Their voices were close and their speech patterns were very similar and they finished each other's sentences a lot.
They liked the idea of playing a role in a murder case— I hadn't gone into a great deal of detail— and they were amused at the response I'd received from various functionaries at the telephone company.
'That's beautiful,' Jimmy Hong said. 'Saying it can't be done.
Meaning most likely that he couldn't figure out how to do it.'
'It's their system,' David King said, 'and you'd think they would at least understand it.'
'But they don't.'
'And they hate us, because we understand it better than they do.'
'And they think we'd hurt the system—'
'— when actually we happen to love the system. Because if you're going to do any serious hacking, NYNEX is where it's at.'
'It's a beautiful system.'
'Unbelievably complex.'
'Wheels within wheels.'
'Labyrinths within labyrinths.'
'The ultimate video game, and the ultimate Dungeons and Dragons, all rolled into one.'
'Cosmic.'
I said. 'But it can be done?'
'What can? Oh, the numbers. Phone calls placed on a specific day to a specific number?'
'Right.'
'Be a problem,' David King said.
'An interesting problem, he means.'
'Right, very interesting. A problem with a solution for sure, a solvable problem.'
'But a tricky one.'
'Because of the amount of data.'
'Tons of data,' Jimmy Hong said. 'Millions and millions of pieces of data.'
'By data he means phone calls.'
'Billions of phone calls. Untold billions of phone calls.'
'Which you have to process.'
'But before you even start to do that—'
'You have to get in.'
'Which used to be easy.'
'Used to be a cinch.'
'They would leave the door open.'
'Now they close it.'
'Nail it shut, you could say.'
