What Nobody Knew - Judy Albietz

Nobody yet knew that Peter was a hacker. So far, he had kept it to himself. Just for the satisfaction of knowing he could do it. That was all, at least so far. But on that morning, three days ago, everything changed for Peter. The day had started out quite normal when he decided to entertain himself by hacking one of the many so-called “secure computer systems” he discovered through his tracking program. He loved the challenge of hacking through security barriers to get access to someone else’s territory. Once there, he didn’t do any damage. He just left to go onto another system.

With a few key-strokes, he found one which looked particularly interesting. It had some strange programming features he’d never seen before. Settling back into his threadbare office chair, he prepared himself for the hours ahead to get through the first level of protection. With his left hand on the keyboard, Peter swiveled half around to reach the table behind him for the remaining half of last night’s burrito. When he returned to face the computer, he was not expecting what he saw.

“Where did you find that?” Peter asked his 24-inch flat panel monitor. Shapes of all sizes in every color of the rainbow were dancing on his screen. More important, they were in 3-D, seeming to jump out at him. “How did you do that?” He asked, now using both his mouse and keyboard to try to get control of the movement on the monitor.

The screen went blank and the familiar cursor popped up. Then the screen flickered and once again it was as before, with Peter’s programming instructions. A little shaken, Peter quickly continued to try to break into this odd system. Within minutes, instead of hours, he found himself at the “door” and was able to enter easily, as if the security shields had all been taken down. The system was totally exposed. Once inside, he saw that he had access to an unfamiliar storage system, holding millions of banks of data.

At this point, Peter almost abandoned the project. First, he it wasn’t any fun to get into someone else’s system that easily. Second, he had a weird feeling about all this. But then he heard something that he couldn’t resist. Music started to come in through his small auxiliary computer speakers. First he heard soothing background tones, almost like a lullaby, with a melody he didn’t recognize. After several minutes, high-pitched flute-like notes joined in. They sounded like words to a song, in a language Peter didn’t recognize.