The Big U

"Catch my drift? I dislike audiences."

Fred Fine avoided this by shaking his head, smiling a red smile and chuckling. The others were unma

"Couldn't we just sit in?" one finally asked. "I've just got to XEQ one routine. It's debugged and bad data tested. It's fast, it outputs on batch. I can wait till you're done."

"Forget it," said Virgil airily, scooting back and nudging him away. "I won't be done for hours. It's all secret Science Shop data. Okay?"

"But turnover for terminals at CC is two hours to the minus one!"

"Try it at four in the morning. You know? Four in the morning is a great time at American Megaversity. Everything is quiet, there are no lines even at the laundry, you can do whatever you want without fucking with a mob of freshmen. Put yourselves on second shift and you'll be fine. Okay?"

They left, sheeshing. Fred Fine stopped in the doorway, still gri

"You're still the same old guy, Virgil. You still program in raw machine code, still have that master key. Don't know where science at AM would be without you. What a wiz."

Virgil stared patiently at the wall. "Fred. I told you I'd fix your MCA and I will. Don't you believe me?"

"Sure I do. Say! That invitation I made you, to join MARS anytime you want, is still open. You'll be a Sergeant right away, and we'll probably commission you after your first night of gaming, from what I know of you."

"Thanks. I won't forget. Goodbye."

"Ciao." Fred Fine bowed his thin frame low and strode off. "What a creep," said Virgil, and ferociously snapped the deadbolt as soon as Fred Fine was almost out of earshot. Removing supplies from the desk drawer, he stuffed a towel under the door and taped black paper over the window. By the terminal he set up a small lamp with gel over its mouth, which cast a dim pool of red once he had shut off the room lights. He activated the terminal, and the computer asked him for the number of his account, Instead of typing in an account number, though, Virgil typed: FIAT LUX.

Later, Virgil and I got to know each other. I had problems with the computer only he could deal with, and after our first contacts he seemed to find me interesting enough to stay in touch, He began to show me parts of his secret world, and eventually allowed me to sit in on one of these computer sessions. Nothing at all made sense until he explained the Worm to me, and the story of Paul Be

"Paul Be

"They hired him right out of his sophomore year?" I asked. "Why not? He had nothing more to learn. The people who were teaching his classes were the same ones whose security programs he was defeating! What's the point of keeping someone like that in school? Anyway, Be

"When they fire a major Computing Center employee, they have to be sneaky. If they give him two weeks' notice he might play havoc with the computer during those two weeks, out of spite. So when they fire these people, it happens overnight. They show up at work and all the locks have been changed, and they have to empty out their desks while the senior staff watch them. That's what they did to Paul Be

"So much for his career, then."

"No. He was immediately hired by a firm in Massachusetts for four times his old salary. And CC was happy, because they'd gotten good work out of him and thought they were safe from reprisals. About a week later, though, the Worm showed up."

"And that is– ?"

"Paul Be

"But what good did it do him? It didn't prevent his being fired,"

"Who the hell knows? I think he put it in to blackmail the CC staff and hold on to his job. That must have been his original plan. But when you make a really beautiful, brilliant program, the temptation to see it work is just overwhelming. He must have been dying to see the Worm in action. So when he was fired, he decided, what the hell, they deserve it, I'll unleash the Worm. That was in the middle of last year. At first it did minor things such as erasing student programs, shutting the System down at odd times, et cetera. Then it began to worm its way deeper and deeper into the Operator– the master program that controls the entire System– and wreak vandalism on a larger scale. The Computing Center perso

"Aha," I said, begi

At this Virgil shrugged. "It's true that I am the sort of person they needed," he said quietly. "But don't assume that they 'got' me."

"Really? You're a free lance?"

"I help them and they help me. It is a free exchange of services. You needn't know the details."

I was willing to accept that restriction. Virgil had told me enough so that what he was doing made sense to me. Still, it was very abstract work, consisting mostly of reading long strings of numbers off the terminal and typing new ones in. On the night I sat in, the Worm had eaten all of the alumni records for people living in states begi

On this night, the first of the new school year, Virgil was not nobly saving erased data from the clutches of the Worm. He was actually arranging his living situation for the coming year. He had about five choice rooms around the Plex, which he filled with imaginary students in order to keep them vacant– an easy matter on the computer. To support his marijuana and ale habits he extracted a high salary from various sources, sending himself paychecks when necessary. For this he felt neither reluctance nor guilt, because Fred Fine was right: without Virgil, whose official job was to work in the Science Shop, scientific research at the Big U would simply stop. To support himself he took money from research accounts in proportion to the extent they depended on him. This was only fair. An indispensable place like the Science Shop needed a strong leader, someone bold enough to levy appropriate taxes against its users and spend the revenues toward the ends those users desired. Virgil had figured out how to do it, and made himself a niche at the Big U more comfortable than anyone else's.