Updated 2 years ago
Episode 1 The Prequel
Master and Apprentice
There was some kind of thrill in searching through dumpsters located behind a secret FBI office. I’m not exactly sure if “The Scorpion” had known it was there, but earlier in the 80’s when us Atari playing BMX’ers where out stealing lumber for loud, neighbor disturbing quarter-pipes, a couple of us kids invaded the seemingly unoccupied office complex that was built over one of our beloved dirt tracks “The Pits”. We joyfully rode the elevator to the top floor of building 3 where a giant “Federal Bureau of Investigation” sign greeted us to a big “Holy shit lets get the fuck out of here”. In the latter part of the 80’s, doctors offices and banks would be the main attraction, but I always knew what was hidden among the corridors and cubicles of this European sedan laden office park , almost like the whole fortress was built to camouflage the new guys in suits snooping around the neighborhood.
I was helping the Scorpion look for phone numbers. Specifically, large stacks of dot matrix printouts with the holes and the perforated edges on the sides. Nothing was shredded back in those days, there was no official internet and only a handful of us stoner nerd wasteoids played with computers like me and him. Nobody else really seemed excited by any of this at the time. It was almost like a Sith Lord Master and Apprentice duality dealing only in absolute values of 1 and 0. My Atari XE that taught me BASIC because I had an interest in video games would be gathering dust by the time Scorpius would introduce me to his 80286 but this was a different game entirely. “Hey, what about this?” I yelled. He rushed over and flipped through the fresh accordion like stack of green and white striped paper then he lifted his head and did a quick glance from side to side, “Come on, let’s get the fuck out of here”
To set the tone here, I was always pushing my mental boundaries a bit further than necessary. Weed was starting to get boring for me and good acid was only around when the Dead came to town unless you wanted to find the guy on roller skates with microdots an hour away up in Central Park. However, Trenton was only a couple of miles away and I had really starting to like smoking “Boat” or PCP. In 1990 it was very easy to get good phencyclidine in the land of George Washington’s first victory battle. Trenton was like a drive-thru McDonalds but with skinny wet stinky pin joints that would make you trip somewhere in between the heady zone and the ghost realm. I didn’t know or care what it was yet, it just kept me intrigued .
Later that week I decided to wander outside late at night after spacing my face with a little bit of a boat ride and I gravitated towards a dark and ominous townhouse. Like a blind fool I knocked. Almost instantly, I saw a little side curtain peek and heard the chain inside come off. The Scorpion opens the door cautiously and does his little side to side quick glance then puts his finger to his lips with a very stern look and goes “ShhhhShhhhhhhhh! come on man what the fuck!”. He reluctantly pulls me inside. All alone, in his house he’s still whispering “Dude, dude, check this out” We huddled down the stairs into his lair. Maybe he was a Sith Lord, more machine now than man. His cane sat by his chair because his bones had been bolted back together numerous times as a result of many dangerous accidents. The tiny room was the late 80’s equivalent of a medieval dungeon other than the fact that on the table was a 286 IBM PC clone of some sort with other peripherals strewn about. It was just like the kind they were selling at Radio Shack that we would mess up at the in-store display centers by entering “format C: “. There was no mouse, Windows wasn’t common yet, this was just a loud floppy disk computer with DOS installed, a monochromatic screen, and a USRobotics 2400 baud modem. I was pretty high by now and it was apparent that something out of the ordinary was going on here.
I eagerly watched him as his robotic leg nervously twitched while pressing the ENTER key. He nudged me to look toward the monitor. Not sure what the fuck I’m looking at yet, it slowly sinks in. On the screen is an ASCII character drawing of a radar dish. Under the picture I could make out enough of the text to raise my adrenaline before he said “In like Flynn” (to me this was an immediate TRON reference) and quickly backed out and shut everything down. I said “A Crystal City military base?” That’s in DC, the Pentagon. The hive of all beehives. I knew of an underground mall in Crystal City because my parents had taken me to DC a few times. This was pretty amazing to see compared to writing a few lines of BASIC code that drew a circle on the screen. I don’t think he would’ve have volunteered this information, he was always pretty reclusive and in his own world. I just happened to knock at right time. Two weeks later, almost exactly one year to the day before the “Internet” went live, he got a knock at the door and it wasn’t me.
If you’ve seen the 1983 movie Wargames with Matthew Broderick, then you know the implications of this. The Scorpion had somehow slipped past a prison sentence and gotten away with faking his comparatively light 50 hours or so of community service. By the time the feds gave him his computer back 3 or so years later (With all the phone numbers and war-dialer programs still intact on the hard drive) I had a brand new Windows 3.1 Pentium 60 mhz desktop computer with a built in modem wired to the internet and early scanner which was very uncommon for home usage back then. Not unlike, like the Scorpion Master who had slacked off and ditched his Computer Science degree for a chance at slicing through the insidious reality hiding inside of our phone lines, I had just somehow graduated from being a Sith Lord apprentice with a Computer Graphics degree and I was about to get real stupid hacking a more conspicuous reality with a flatbed image scanner.
The Spacehawk
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