Hackers, in fiction, are the trickster-gods of the realm of computing. They go where they're not supposed to, steal anything that isn't nailed down (or rather, written down in ink on parchment with a quill plucked from a white goose), and boast about it. There is a refreshing immediacy to their activities because they move at the speed of light, cropping up anywhere they wish.
In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. Real hackers-computer programmers in the sense that the word was coined at MIT in the 1960s-are meticulous, intelligent, mathematically and linguistically inclined obsessives. Far from diving in and out of your bank account details, they're more likely to spend months working on a mathematical model of an abstraction that only another hacker would understand, or realise was an elaborate intellectual joke. All engineering disciplines generate a shared culture and jargon. The computing field has generated a remarkably rich jargon, and a shared culture to go with it. In some cases the sense of tradition is astonishingly strong; there are clubs and mutual support groups, for instance, for those people who choose to lovingly nurse along the twenty-year-old minicomputers they rescued from scrapheaps, rather than abandon them and move what software they can to a new generation of hardware.
At the other end of the spectrum are the script kiddies and warez dudes, the orcish adolescent otaku who trash other people's work machines and try to take over chat networks in a fit of asocial misspelled pique. These are the real and mildly destructive hackers who generate most of the newspaper headlines and outrage-tweaking the codebase of moronic email viruses, hanging out online and moaning endlessly, swallowing the image reflected back at them by the magic mirror of the tabloid press.
But if we return for a moment to the fictional hacker, not only do we discover the archetype of the trickster-god lurking just round the corner, but we also discern the outline of our spy/horror protagonist hunched over their keyboard, trying to dig down into the network of dreams and fears to understand what's really going on.
Every science-fictional depiction of a hacker at work seems to be about pulling away the rug to reveal a squirming mass of icky truths hiding beneath the carpet of reality. From John M. Ford's Web of Angels onward, we've had hackers exploiting networks to find the truth about what's really going on. Sometimes the hacker archetype overlaps with the guy-with-a-gun (as in Ken MacLeod's The Star Fraction or William Gibson's Johnny Mnemonic), or the gamer-with-a-virtual-gun (in film, Mamoru Oshii's Avalon), or even both (Hiro Protagonist, in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash). Mao remarked, "power grows from the barrel of a gun"-both in real life and in fiction-and if guns are about power, then hacking is about secret knowledge, and knowledge is also power. In fact, when you get down to it, what the fictional hacker has come to symbolize is not that far away from the fictional spy-or the nameless narrator of one of H. P. Lovecraft's strange tales of exploration and alienation.
Hacking the Subconscious, Spying on Horror, Revealing Reality
There's an iron tripod buried in the basement of the Laundry, carved with words in an alien language that humans can only interpret with the aid of a semisentient computer program that emulates Chomsky's deep grammar. Unfortunately the program is prone to fits of sulking, and because it obeys a nondeterministic algorithm it frequently enters a fatal loop when it runs. There is no canonical translation of the inscription. Government linguists tried to de-cypher the runes the hard way; all those who tried wound up dead or incarcerated in the Funny Farm. After a systems analyst suggested that the carving might really be the function binding for our reality, and that pronouncing it with understanding would cause a fatal exception, Mahogany Row decided to discourage future research along these lines.
The metafictional conceit that magic is a science has been used in fantasy-or science fiction-several times. James Gunn's The Magicians is explicitly based upon it. Rick Cook managed to squeeze several books from the idea of a socially clueless programmer stranded in fantasyland and forced to compete with the magi by applying his unfair expertise in compiler design. There is something about mathematics that makes it seem to beg for this sort of misappropriation: an image problem deeply rooted both in the way that the queen of sciences is taught, and in the way we think about it-in the philosophy of mathematics.
Plato spoke of a realm of mathematical truth, and took the view that unearthing a theorem was a matter of discovery: it revealed its truth to us like a shadow cast upon the wall of a cave by a light source and a reality invisible to our eyes. Later Descartes used similar reasoning and a weasely analogical excuse to split the world into things of the spirit and of the flesh. If the body was clearly an organic machine, someone had to be in a driving seat controlling it through a switchboard located (he believed) in the pineal gland.
The history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century medical research was a disaster for the idea of an immortal soul. Mind-body dualism sounds good, until you realise that it implies that the body's sensory nerves must in some way transfer information to the soul, and the soul must somehow affect the dumb matter with which it is associated. When the best microscopes could barely resolve nerve fibres, this was not a problem: but the devil lies in the detail, and with electron micrographs taking us down to the macromolecular level of cytology, and with biochemistry finally beginning to explain how everything works, the brain was revealed for what it is-a mass of fleshy endocrine cells squirting their neurotransmitter messages at one another in promiscuous abandon. There is precious little room left for a soul that can remain hidden but nevertheless influence the flesh.
But. Let us take Plato's realm of mathematical abstraction seriously; and with it, let us adopt the Wheeler model of quantum cosmology-that there exists an infinity of possible worlds, and all of them are real. Can we, by way of the Platonic realm, transfer signals between our own sheaf of human-friendly realities and others, infinitely distant and infinitely close, where other minds might listen? What if, in other words, the multiverse is leaky? What sort of people might first discover such information leakage, and to what use would they put it, and what risks would they encounter in the process?
This is the twentieth (and early twenty-first) century, an age of spooks and wonder, of conspiracies and Cold War, an age in which the horror of the pulp magazines lurched forth onto the world stage in trillion-dollar weapons projects capable of smashing cities and incinerating millions. This is not the era of the two-fisted hero-scientist putting the finishing touches on his spherical exploration machine before setting off on a flight to Galaxy Z. Nor is it the age of the mad scientist in his castle basement, laboriously stitching together the graveyard trawl while Igor flies a kite from the battlements to bring the animating power down to the thing on the slab. It is the decade of the computer scientist, the fast-thinking designer of abstract machines that float on a Platonic realm of thought and blink in or out of existence with a mouseclick.
We can get some ideas about the lives and occupations of these people by extrapolating from the published material about the intelligence services. James Bamford's Body of Secrets, a deep and fascinating history of the US National Security Agency, offers some hints from outside-as do other histories of the cryptic profession, such as David Kahn's The Codebreakers and Alan Hodges's masterful biography of Alan Turing-for if any agency gets its hands on tools for probing the Platonic realm, it will be a kissing cousin of the kings of cryptography.