The Blue Nowhere

the whole world.Well, that’s bullshit. That’s not where life is.” He grabbed Gillette’s jacket. The hacker didn’t resist, just stared at the enraged man’s face. Shelton snapped, “Life is here! Flesh and blood . . . human beings . . . Your family, your children. . . .” His voice choked, tears filled his eyes. “ That’s what’s real.”
    Shelton shoved the hacker back, wiped his eyes with his hands. Bishop stepped forward and touched his arm. But Shelton pulled away and disappeared into the crowd of police and agents.
    Gillette’s heart went out to the poor man but he couldn’t help but think: Machines’re real too, Shelton. They’re becoming more and more a part of that flesh-and-blood life every day and that’s never going to change. The question we have to ask ourselves isn’t whether this transformation is in itself good or bad but simply this: Who do we become when we step through the monitor into the Blue Nowhere?
    The detective and the hacker, alone now, stood facing each other. Bishop noticed his shirt was untucked. He shoved the tail into his slacks then nodded at the palm tree tattoo on Gillette’s forearm. “You might want to get that removed, you know. I don’t think it does a lot for you. The pigeon at least. The tree’s not too bad.”
    “It’s a seagull,” the hacker replied. “But now that you bring it up, Frank . . . why don’t you get one?”
    “What?”
    “A tattoo.”
    The detective started to say something then lifted an eyebrow. “You know, maybe I just will.”
    Then Gillette felt his arms being gripped from behind. The state troopers had arrived, right on schedule, to return him to San Ho.

CHAPTER 00101111 / FORTY-SEVEN
    A week after the hacker returned to prison Frank Bishop made good on Andy Anderson’s promise and, over the warden’s renewed objections, delivered to Wyatt Gillette a battered, secondhand Toshiba laptop computer.
    When he booted it up the first thing he saw was a digitized picture of a fat, dark-complected baby, a few days old. The caption beneath it read “Greetings—from Linda Sanchez and her new granddaughter, Maria Andie Harmon.” Gillette made a mental note to send her a letter of congratulations; a baby present would have to wait, federal prisons not having gift shops as such.
    There was no modem included with the computer of course. Gillette could have gone online simply by building a modem out of Devon Franklin’s Walkman (bartered to Gillette for some apricot preserves) but he chose not to. It was part of his deal with Bishop. Besides, all he wanted now was for the last year of his sentence to roll by and to get on with his life.
    Which isn’t to say that he was completely quarantined from the Net. He’d been allowed onto the library’s dog-slow IBM PC to help with the analysis of Shawn, whose new foster home was Stanford University. Gillette was working with the school’s computer scientists and with Tony Mott. (Frank Bishop had emphatically denied Mott’s request to be transferred to Homicide and had placated the young cop by recommending that he be named acting head of the Computer Crimes Unit, which Sacramento agreed to.)
    What Gillette had found within Shawn had astonished him. To give Phate access to as many computers as possible, via Trapdoor, he’d endowed his creation with its own operating system. It was unique, incorporating all existing operating systems: Windows, MS-DOS, Apple, Unix, Linux, VMS and a number of obscure systems for scientific and engineering applications. It would also modify itself to incorporate any new operating systems Phate loaded into it. His system, which he called Protean 1.1, reminded Gillette of the elusive unified theory that explains the behavior of all matter and energy in the universe.
    Only Phate, unlike Einstein and his progeny, had apparently succeeded in his quest.
    One thing that Shawn didn’t disgorge was the source code to Trapdoor or the location of any sites where it might be hidden. The woman calling herself Patricia Nolan had, it seemed, been successful in isolating and stealing the code then destroying all other copies.
    She hadn’t been found either.
    It used to be easy to disappear because there were no computers to trace you, Gillette had told Bishop upon learning this news. Now, it was easy to disappear because computers can erase all the traces of your old identity and create brand-new ones.
    Bishop reported that Stephen Miller had been given a