The Adventures Of Hax0r Man

Chapter 2

Hax0r Man takes a walk

by LateBlt

  Hax0r Man doesn't move around much; he rarely has a need to. Despite this,
even a hax0r sometimes wonders what's going on in the larger world around him
or herself. Hax0rs being the endlessly curious people they are, this wonder
sometimes leads them to explore.
  So one day while he's waiting for his operating system kernel to recompile,
Hax0r Man decides to go outside and just walk around for a while, to see
what's going on. He figures he'll probably see many wonderful and interesting
things.
  Of course, any human-populated area can be mostly described as a lot of
buildings separated by streets. Hax0r Man sees lots of both buildings and
streets. The streets would be interesting if Hax0r Man were in a car, but
he's walking today, so he figures the buildings will be more interesting for
this event. But Hax0r Man discovers that even the street--or rather, the
sidewalk--has noteworthy objects of its own when he passes a machine mounted
on a pole with several buttons on it. Taking a closer look, Hax0r Man notices
that the buttons appear to be most of a numeric keypad; they are all the
digits from 0 to 9, with a couple of extra buttons at the bottom, although
instead of period and Enter keys, they appear to be an asterisk and a hash
mark.
  Hax0r Man wonders what such a machine might do. You couldn't really use it
very effectively, in any case, because it has no letters on it. How would you
enter non-numeric characters? Hax0r Man pushes a few of the buttons, but
nothing happens. Perhaps the device is waiting for an IP address? Hax0r Man
tries punching in 127*0*0*1 and 127#0#0#1 in an attempt to see if the device
can loop back to itself; presumably either the asterisk or hash mark is some
kind of strange notation for an octet separator. But nothing happens when
Hax0r Man does this.
  Finally, Hax0r Man stops to ask a person walking down the sidewalk if they
know what the machine is for. This is one of the exciting things about real
reality: You can just talk to anyone at a moment's notice. In real cities,
people are often walking down the sidewalks, just like in computer games!
Reality has become so realistic that it almost feels like the games now.
  "Excuse me, ma'am," Hax0r Man calls out to a woman. "Do you know how to use
this device?"
  "Umm, yes, it's a telephone," the woman responds with some hesitation. "You
dial the number of whoever you want to talk to, and that's it."
  "A telephone?!" Hax0r Man is thunderstruck. He has heard about such
devices, but never imagined that the stories could be true. A telephone, from
what he understands, is an audio-only device that mainly allows people to
speak to each other remotely. That people would bother to make such a device
when this functionality is duplicated by a computer seems counter-intuitive
to Hax0r Man, and he was always sure that they must be a sort of inside joke
among people who know that such uninteresting and money-losing pursuits would
never be embraced by a material world.
  But, Hax0r Man recalls, there are certain things that can be done over
telephone lines besides speaking to people. Thinking a little deeper on this
train of thought, Hax0r Man asks the woman: "How do you type on this
telephone?"
  "Type? You don't. You just talk. The buttons are only to dial a phone
number."
  "So what if I call a BBS and want to type a message to other users?"
  "A BBS? What's that?"
  At this point, Hax0r Man comes to the understanding that he is speaking to
a member of the mentally handicapped. While many people have little time or
patience for such unfortunate folks, Hax0r Man has always appreciated the
fact that these people have special problems which are not their fault, and
they deserve to be treated with the respect due to any other person. Anyone
who doesn't know what a BBS is obviously lives in such a small, isolated
fragment of reality that they must suffer from some form of autism or
something like that.
  Hax0r Man opts not to answer the woman's question, correctly guessing that
she probably wouldn't understand the answer anyway, and asks another
question: "Can you please direct me to an Internet-enabled device like this?"
  "You mean a computer? There are lots of computers around, but you'd need to
go to a cybercafe if you don't have one. There's a nice cybercafe just a few
blocks from here..."
  "I'm all right with just using a public terminal on the sidewalk like this
one," Hax0r Man says. "I don't really need to sit down in a cybercafe."
  The woman eyes Hax0r Man with an odd look. "They don't have computers on
sidewalks. Have you ever seen one?"
  "Well, no. No, I haven't, which is why I'm asking you where I can find
one," answers Hax0r Man.
  "There aren't any. Not around here, anyway."
  "Where do I need to go, then?"
  "I don't know. There's nothing like that in the Bay Area."
  Hax0r Man's jaw drops. "But this is Silicon Valley! Do you mean to tell me
that in all of Silicon Valley, there are no computers for people to use when
they're walking on the street?"
  "That's correct. Have you ever seen one?" the woman asks, obviously
irritated now.
  "No, but... Oh, I can't believe this. How can it be possible? This is
supposed to be a technologically advanced place! There should be computer
terminals on the sidewalk like this every 10 feet! In fact, less than that.
There should be one every 5 or 6 feet. Actually, 6 inches sounds right. That
way, nobody would have to walk more than 3 inches, maximum, to get to a
workstation."
  "Okay, if you say so, but I don't think you'll find anything like that
around here."
  "By 'around here', do you actually mean all of Silicon Valley?"
  "That's correct."
  Hax0r Man is crushed. There are no computers for people to use, and instead
cities propagate useless, obsolete devices that can't convey any information?
Something is very wrong here.
  "Thank you for your time," Hax0r Man says to the woman. Then he turns
around and decides to check out some buildings. Surely the buildings MUST
have something interesting in them. After all, people seem to spend most of
their time in those buildings.
  Hax0r Man walks into the first building he finds, and stops to ask someone
"Excuse me. What kind of computer company is this?"
  The older man who is the target of Hax0r Man's question gives him a blank
look. "Computer company?"
  "Yes, sir. Do they make ICs, or are they more of an OEM?"
  "This isn't a computer company. This is a drugstore."
  "A drugstore?" Hax0r Man asks doubtfully. "Do they make drugs for
computers?"
  "Uh... No. They make drugs for human beings, like you and me."
  Speak for yourself, Hax0r Man thinks to himself. But he says "I understand.
Okay, thank you, sir."
  Hax0r Man walks out and waits for his pulse to return to normal. He must
have found, on his very first try, some sort of building that's being used as
a front for organized crime. And not a very good one, either; a drugstore! In
Silicon Valley! Nobody's going to believe that. Oh well, no worries, he'll
just try the building next door.
  "Good day," Hax0r Man greets a woman in the next building over. "Can you
please tell me what kind of computer company this is?"
  The woman looks at Hax0r Man as though he does not exist. "It's not a
computer company," she finally says.
  A few minutes ago, Hax0r Man would have laughed, but a sick feeling is
beginning to creep up in the pit of his stomach. He starts to have a terrible
suspicion that she's not joking or lying.
  He decides to make sure. "If it's not a computer company, then what is it?"
  "This is a hair salon. Would you like your hair cut?"
  Hax0r Man runs outside and looks around him, now beginning to feel genuine
terror. What is going on here? Has he somehow stumbled into an alternate
reality? Or perhaps he's walked too far, and gone all the way out of Silicon
Valley. But no, such is not the case; checking his GPS wristwatch, Hax0r Man
confirms what he already knew: He's in Sunnyvale. How could there be a hair
salon in a place like this? Where are all the computer companies?
  Hax0r Man walks along a little further, and seems something so outrageous
that he actually has to sit down on the sidewalk to keep from falling down.
Houses! Several of them! All lined up in a row, stretching on for several
city blocks. Houses! Who uses HOUSES around here? This is Silicon Valley!
People are supposed to sleep under their desks when they're not working.
Houses have no place in such an environment.
  Hax0r Man runs back home as fast as he can, and shuts himself into his
cardboard box. Something is terribly, horribly wrong about the world outside.
Hax0r Man's walk is over.