Doctor Who_ Blue Box - Kate Orman [7]
Bob was the sort of kid who just didn’t get into trouble much: the one time he had been sent to the principal’s office for talking in class, he actually cried. Nonetheless, the temptation struck Bob many times: alone in the wee hours of the morning, desperately curious about some other machine he could see dangling out there in the imaginary blackness beyond his monitor. But he never dared.
Except once. Bob spent one hot summer at ‘computer camp’, staying at a college campus with six other whiz kids.
Bob soon found himself providing technical support to the guys who ran the college machines. It was like high school all over again, but this time the teachers knew almost as much as he did.
The day before Bob went home, he broke into the account used by the sysops for most of their test work. A file was displayed every time someone logged in to the test account, showing the home phone numbers of the technical team. Bob located the file and quietly added his own name and phone number to the end of the list.
The sysadmins noticed the addition right away, and amusedly gave Bob a call at home to see if he could fix a bug that was troubling their system. He did it in less than an hour.
‘But please, please don’t tell my dad,’ he pleaded.
A couple of weeks later Bob’s father asked him for a very serious piece of help: locating a trapdoor maliciously planted in the software he was helping to develop. That was when Bob met the Doctor.
The phone rang. Bob fell off the bed. Peri snatched up the receiver. ‘Doctor?’
‘Were you able to locate young Mr Salmon?’ said the Doctor.
‘He’s not so young any more,’ retorted Peri, but Bob was already begging for the phone.
‘Hey, Doctor?’ he said, cradling the receiver in both hands. His face split into an excited grin. ‘It’s me. Uh-huh. I did get into college. But I spent so much time working in the compute centre that they made me sysop, so I’m taking a year off my studies. How about you? Uh-huh. Uh-huh.’ Suddenly, he froze. ‘You want us to do what?’ There was a long pause while he listened. ‘Are you sure about this? OK. OK.’ He grabbed a pen.
Peri pushed the hotel stationery across the desk towards him, but he was already writing something on his skinny arm.
‘OK. Talk to you later.’
Peri was reaching for the receiver when Bob hung it up.
‘He did not want to stay on the line,’ he said.
‘Well, what did he tell you?’
‘He wants us to find a computer component so we can steal it,’ said Bob. ‘You won’t believe where he wants us to steal it from.’
‘Where?’ said Peri. ‘The Russian Embassy? The Iranian Embassy? Do we even have those? NASA?’
‘TLA2,’ said Bob, in a hushed voice. ‘He wants us to go to the TLA building and steal something from Sarah Swan.’
2 Not its real acronym
Four
Sarah Swan’s first love wasn’t computers, but telephones. Her first ever phone crime was tapping her parents’ line, using a broken-down old tapedeck and a pair of earphones. A dedicated ‘phone phreak’ by the age of twelve, she built her own blue box from scratch out of Radio Shack components: a palm-sized brick of black plastic studded with, buttons, it generated tones which fooled the phone system into giving her free long-distance calls. She traded tips and technology with other phreaks, mostly blind teenagers she spoke to over improvised party lines.
Fishing in a telco trash can for phone system manuals, a teenage Sarah came across a list of phone numbers for the company’s computers. With a few hints from her sightless friends, she broke in and looked up her own home number.
She discovered she could trim back her phone bill, add services to her home phone, change her number,