he said carefully so as not to offend Holland"s proud hosts.

"But I think the Spook had more fun than I did."

The Flying Dutchman"s hand went limp. "Spook? Did you say Spook?" His astonishment was clear.

"Yeah, why?" Scott asked.

"The Spook? Here? No one has seen him in years."

"Yeah, well he"s alive and well and s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g his brains out with three of Amsterdam"s finest," Scott said with amus.e.m.e.nt. "What"s the big deal?"

"The Spook, ya this is goot," the Flying Dutchman said clapping his hands together with approval. "He was the greatest phreak of his day. He retired years ago, and has only been seen once or two times maybe. He is a legend."

"A phreak?"

"Oh, ya, ya. A phreak," he said speaking rapidly. "Before home computers, in the 1960"s and 1970"s, hacking meant fighting the phone company. In America you call it Ma Bell, I believe. Cap- tain Crunch was the epitome of phone phreaks."

These names were a bit much, thought Scott, but might add a sense of levity to his columns. "Captain Crunch?" Scott asked with skepticism.

"Ya, Captain Crunch. He blew the plastic whistle from a Captain Crunch cereal box into the phone," the Flying Dutchman held an invisible whistle to his lips. "And it opened up an inside line to make long distance calls. Then he built and sold Blue Boxes which recreated the tones to make free calls."

"Phreaking and computer hacking, they"re the same?"

"Ya, ya, especially for the older hackers." The Flying Dutchman patted himself on the stomach. "You see hacking, some call it cracking, is taking a system to its limit. Exploring it, master- ing the machine. The phones, computers, viruses, it"s all hack- ing. You understand?"

"Spook called hacking a technique for investigating new spontane- ously generated lifeforms. He said a network was a living being.

We got into quite an argument about it." Scott sounded mildly derisive of the theory.

The Dutchman crossed his arms, grinned wide and rocked back and forth on his heels. "Ya, ya. That sounds like the Spook.

Cutting to the heart of the issue. Ya, you see, we all have our reasons why we hack, but ya, Spook is right. We forget sometimes that the world is one giant computer, with thousands and millions of arms, just like the brain. The neurons," he pointed at his head, "are connected to each other with synapses. Just like a computer network."

The Flying Dutchman"s explanation was a little less ethereal than the Spook"s and Scott found himself antic.i.p.ating further enlight- enment.

"The neuron is a computer. It can function independently, but because it"s capacity is tiny, a neuron is really quite limited in what it can achieve alone. The synapse is like the network wire, or phone company wiring. It connects the neurons or com- puters together." The Dutchman spoke almost religiously as he animatedly drew wires and computers in the air to reinforce the concept. "Have you heard of neural networks?"

"Absolutely," Scott said. "The smart chips that can learn."

"Ya, exactly. A neural network is modeled after the brain, too.

It is a very large number of cells, just like the brain"s cells, that are only connected to each other in the most rudimentary way."

"Like a baby"s brain?" Scott offered.

"Ya, ya, just like a baby. Very good. So like the baby, the neural net grows connections as it learns. The more connections it makes, the smarter it gets."

"Both the baby and the network?"

"Ya," Dutchman laughed. "So as the millions of neural connec- tions are made, some people learn skills that others don"t and some computers are better suited to certain tasks than others.

And now there"s a global neural network growing. Millions more computers are added and we connect them together, until any computer can talk to any other computer. Ya, the Spook is very much right. The Network is alive, and it is still learning."

Scott was entering a world where the machines, the computers, were personified, indeed imbued with a life of their own by their creators and their programmers. A highly complex world where inter-relatedness is infinitely more important than the specific function. Connections are issue. Didn"t Spook remind him that the medium is the message?

But where, questioned Scott, is the line between man and machine?

If computers are stupid, and man must program them to give them the appearance of intelligence, then the same must be true of the Network, the global information network. Therefore, when a piece of the Network is programmed to learn how to plan for future Network expansion and that piece of the Network calls another computer on the Network to inquire as to how it is answering the same problem for different conditions, don"t man and machine merge? Isn"t the Network acting as an extension of man? But then, a hammer is a tool as well, and no one calls a hammer a living being.

Unto itself it is not alive, Scott reasoned. The Network merely emulates the growth patterns and behavior of the cranial highway system. He was ready to concede that a network was more alive than a hammer, but he could not bring himself to carry the a.n.a.lo- gy any further yet.

"That gives me a lot to think about," Scott a.s.sured the Dutchman.

"Ya, ya, it does. Do you understand quantum physics?"

What the h.e.l.l would make him ask that question, thought Scott.

"I barely pa.s.sed Quantum 101, the math was too far out for me, but, yes," he laughed kindly, "I do remember the basics. Very basic."

"Goot. In the global Network there is no way to predict where the next information packet will be sent. Will it start here,"

the Dutchman motioned to his far left, "or here? There"s no way to know. All we can say, just as in physics, is that there is a probability of data being transferred between any two points.

Chance. And we can also view the Network in operation as both a wave and a particle."

"Wait," stopped Scott. "You"ve just gone over my head, but I get the point, I think. You and your a.s.sociates really believe that this global Network is an ent.i.ty unto itself and that it is growing and evolving on its own as we speak?"

"Ya, exactly. You see, no one person is responsible for the Network, its growth or its care. Like the brain, many different regions control their own piece of the Network. And, the Network can still function normally even if pieces of it are disconnect- ed. The split brain studies."

"And you"re the caretakers for the Network?" doubted Scott.

"No. As I said we all have our reasons. The common denominator is that we treat the Network as an incredibly powerful organism about which we know very, very little. That is our function - to learn."

"What is it that you do? For a living?"

"Ah, ya. I am Professor of Technological Sociology at the Uni- versity of Amsterdam. The original proposal for my research came from personal beliefs and concerns; about the way the human race has to learn to cope in the face of great technology leaps. NATO is funding the research."

"NATO," exclaimed Scott. "They fund hacking?"

"No," laughed the Dutchman. "They know that hacking is necessary to gather the raw data my research requires, so they pretend not to notice or care. What we are trying to do is predict what the Baby, the global Network will look and act like when it grows up."

"Isn"t crystal ball gazing easier?"

"Ya, it may be," the Dutchman agreed. "But now, why don"t you look around? I am sure you will find it most educational."

The Dutchman asked again about the Spook. "Is he really here in Amsterdam?" Yup! "And he said he"d be here today?" Yup! "The Spook, at the conference? He hasn"t made an appearance in years."

Well, that"s what he told me, he"d be here.

Scott profusely thanked his host and a.s.sured him that yes, he would ask for anything he needed. Thank you. Kirk had been vindicated, thought Scott who had expected a group of pimply faced adolescents with nerd shirts to be bouncing around like Spring Break in Fort Lauderdale.

Scott slowly explored the tables loaded with various types of computer gear. IBM clones were the most common, but an a.s.sort- ment of older machines, a CP/M or two, even a Commodore PET proved that expensive new equipment was not needed to become a respected hacker. Scott reminded himself that this group was the elite of hackerdom. These were the Hacker"s Hackers.

In his discussions with Kirk, Scott figured he would see some of the tools of the trade. But he had no idea of the level of sophistication that was openly, and perhaps, illegally, being demonstrated. Then again, maybe that"s why they hold their Hacker Ho Downs in Amsterdam.

Scott learned something very critical early on.

"Once you let one of us inside your computer, it"s all over. The system is ours." The universal claim by hackers.