Simon Fraser (IV)

Freddy had a dream that woke him at 5:30 in the morning. He was in a restroom – the type you would find in a restaurant or small office – a shitter against one wall, a urinal against another, a sink against a third, no stall or dividers, one door.

Freddy (or “Dream Freddy”) was sitting on the toilet having finished his business a moment before. He noticed that the door was slightly ajar; not the best scenario in which to begin a dream.

Of course, as soon as Dream Freddy realized the door was open a sliver, it opened wide and another man entered the restroom. He was tall, perhaps 6’4″, thin, black shirt, black pants, black suit jacket, middle-aged and entirely rude. His entry caught Dream Freddy by surprise.

“Uh, occupied,” Dream Freddy said. But the stranger ignored him, went to the urinal and started to take a piss. “Excuse me!” exclaimed Dream Freddy sitting on the pot, “Occupied!”

The stranger ignored him and continued pissing, his back to the dreamer. Dream Freddy got to his feet, pulled up his pants, flushed. Noticing that the stranger was finishing his business at the urinal, Dream Freddy quickly moved to the sink, hoping to cut the jerk off, force him to atleast wait for the splash of water that would clean his hands.

Dream Freddy turned on the cold water and had his hands under the stream but for a moment before he was shoved aside by the stranger. He was stunned – what had he ever done to this stranger? Was the guy paid to be an asshole? Whose payroll was he on? And what had Freddy ever done to warrant such insult?

The stranger finished washing up as Dream Freddy stood there flabbergasted, then he stepped out as unaware of the first occupant as he’d been stepping in. “Excuse me?” Dream Freddy said as the man exited. The door closed behind him.

“What the fuck?”

And a little voice inside Dream Freddy’s head which was inside sleeping Freddy’s head said, “What are you gonna do about it, boy?” Like a slavemaster or white-hooded motherfucker telling a black man, “I defy you to defy me, nigger!” Like a gob of spit landing in the eye of his spirit. A castration of the authority of oneself. The non-existence of the self. That’s how it felt to Dream Freddy. “Fuck it,” he said and didn’t bother washing his hands. He went after the dream stranger.

As soon as he went through the doorway, he was in a wide open office area, like a bank or library. Without money or books. He was in a university or college of some sort. Cheap mustard-hued industrial carpet, desks and chairs and small filing cabinets scattered geometrically around the vast room. Not a computer or modern office device to be found; no dividers, no interior walls; he’d stepped into the past (or a severely underfunded institution).

Clerks and administrators sitting at their desks sifting through papers that had no meaning, typing words without thought on old oversized Olympic typewriters, transcribing, affixing, posting, wasting their most valuable resource – time to live.

Dream Freddy spotted the stranger making his way through the nostalgic maze of vintage office furniture to the glass doors (reinforced with wire mesh) which led outside.

Dream Freddy turned to a clerk, a pasty white woman in a frilly white blouse with gray hair dyed far too blond for someone of her pallor. A large pair of glasses rested upon the bridge of her nose, their cheap faux-gold chain slung around her neck. Her eyes never left the original copy of whatever it was she was transcribing; her fingers never left the keys – she was a “A-S-D-F-J-K-L-colon” girl all the way. She typed away, something so unimportant that she forgot each word as soon as it had been typed. Sentences meant nothing to her, paragraphs even less. Her life was measured in words per minute. And every word was an average of five letters.

Dream Freddy broke into her world, “Excuse me?”

She stopped; her wrinkled face, plastered with foundation and blush, looked up at him.

“Do you know that gentleman?” he asked her, pointing at the stranger. She shook her head. “I was going to the toilet and he walked in, refused to leave and shoved me away from the sink.” Dream Freddy still could not believe the unmitigated gall.

“What do you want me to do about it?” the old crag asked.

And the little voice in Dream Freddy’s head spoke once again: “What?! What do I want you to ‘do’?! Holy fuck, lady! Does anyone here know what good manners are?! Keep taking orders, bitch! Have a blind/bland life!”

Dream Freddy followed the stranger, pursued him, moving swiftly through the mindless quagmire of typists and obedience.

Then he was outside in the open air. Dream Freddy was walking along a wide concrete corridor adjacent to another building on campus. The building’s shaded glass windows concealed the activities within. On the other side of the corridor that ran the length of the building was a grassy slope with flowers and shrubs, an occasional set of perhaps ten steps which led down to an even wider pedestrian walkway of interlocking brick. An iron railing prevented anyone from trodding upon the grass, flowers and shrubs. Hundreds of students were coming and going or socializing in small groups, eager faces, happy voices, graded.

Dream Freddy followed the stranger, ten feet behind.

“Hey asshole! Hey fucko!” he taunted the stranger. A few students glanced at him – presumably those which had been called assholes and fuckos before.

The stranger kept walking.

“Hey cocksucker, didn’t anybody teach you it’s rude to intrude on someone in the crapper?!” The stranger’s head perked a little – as it occurred to him he might be the one being addressed. “Yeah that’s right, I’m talking to you, fuckface.”

The stranger stopped and turned. Some of the students turned their heads too; most kept moving though. Dream Freddy approached the stranger.

“Are you going to apologize or are you a complete asshole?” The stranger did not respond. He stood there with a small fire kindling in his eyes – a bully or a coward. The same shallow face of the high school senior who had shoved Freddy in the ninth grade, saying “Get outta my way, weasel,” for no other reason than the illusion of superiority. It had taken Freddy another fifteen years to have this dream, a decade-and-a-half of having to put up with these undeveloped problem children, these pathetic creatures buried to their noses in self-pity and delusions of otherness. Poor sods all.

“Are you listening to me, motherfucker?” Dream Freddy asked the stranger, every slur and curse another broken link in a chain. Students moved past them, unconcerned with their argument.

“Are you fucking deaf?! You fuck! I was using the restroom, fucknuts. You come in, you take a piss, you shove me away from the sink and you leave. Are you some kind of fucking moron?!”

The stranger didn’t say anything; he turned and started to walk away.

“Where d’you think you’re going? Hey!”

The stranger continued to walk away, as if Dream Freddy had merely been a dying mosquito buzzing around inside his dew-moistened tent.

“Hey!!!” yelled Dream Freddy, pushing the stranger hard from behind. The stranger stumbled forward a few steps then turned to face his attacker and finally spoke, “Don’t push me.”

“Don’t push you?… Don’t push you?!… Don’t!… Push!… You?!!”

Almost all the students in the corridor had heard him. He had everyone’s attention. But all Dream Freddy saw was this son of a bitch standing in front of him with his fists clenched and ready; his voice silent with power. Goliath.

“Fuck you!” screamed Dream Freddy in absolute rage as his right foot swung up quickly and he fucking hoofed the bastard hard in the gonads.

Whoomp! Time stood still as every student and pedestrian in the plaza who had stopped and watched could hear the sound and feel the force reverberate in their own sex organs. When the stranger crumpled to the concrete, a little part of everyone went down with him.

But even as he lay on the ground in what must have been complete and utter pain, the stranger still managed to conceal any emotion; he was that ignorant. A few students came to his aid; they said nothing to Dream Freddy who stood there wishing the stranger would rise to take a second kick in the nuts, and a third, a fourth, a fifth.

But the stranger did not stand. He had a look on his face that seemed to ask the question, “What am I doing here on the ground?” Pretty much everyone else in the plaza continued on, going about their business, off to lessons, off to learn only those things which can be taught, not those things that must be experienced.

And Freddy, the real Freddy, slowly floated up to the surface of the world, opened his eyes, stilled shrink-wrapped in crusty salt, and saw the dull blue Los Angelean pre-dawn light coming in through a window.

He looked at the clock, jerked off, took a shower, brushed his teeth and walked to the donut shop for a coffee. 6AM and he felt wonderful, magnificent, alive, and most of all, polite.

When Freddy was twelve, his mother enrolled him in a summer computer course at the local post-secondary. He had excelled in mathematics + his teacher suggested that he explore the wonderful world of computer programming ÷ Freddy’s parents were in the midst of separating and did not want him clouding the discussions × Freddy didn’t much mind because, to him, a computer translated to computer games = Freddy was twelve and liked games.

The course began in late June, two hours per day, three days a week. It was called, “Introduction to Basic”. A redundant title, Freddy thought.

Though Freddy regarded the computer as a novelty, there had at that time been recent developments in the American Northwest of a personal computer operating system called DOS. It had been bought, repackaged and resold by a young bull named Bill Gates, who would eventually become the richest man in the Western hemisphere, despite (or perhaps because of) his SNAFU mentality.

The campus computer was a Cyber supercomputer; at the time, the third largest in the world (this was back when bigger, not smaller, meant better). The mainframe was contained in three large rooms in the center of the main campus building. Cables ran along corridor ceilings connecting terminals all over the campus to the mainframe. A floppy disk was 5″ square and actually was floppy. There were even card-punching terminals, as if anyone should be required to communicate via holes in a piece of cardstock. Could you imagine what that would do to the science of electioneering?

It was ancient to today’s technology; but in 1982, it was top of the line. Or so they were told.

Freddy’s class only lasted one month but, in that time, Freddy made the acquaintance of a computer hacker named Ogilvie. Ogilvie was maybe nineteen, but his unshaven face, messy hair, unstylish clothes and inferiority complex made him seem twenty-five. He never revealed his real age.

About a week before Freddy’s course was to end, he was at a vending machine in a low-traffic hallway, trying to buy a pastry that had been waiting to be bought for almost two weeks. He inserted two quarters, made his selection, nothing happened. Another two quarters, another selection, more nothing.

Ogilvie happened to be passing by and noticed the kid’s dilemma – hunger v. poverty.

“Why do you even bother?” he asked Freddy.

“Cause I’m hungry,” Freddy snapped back in frustration. Ogilvie stopped and approached.

“Listen, kid, you don’t need to put any money in it. Lemme see your arm.”

“What?”

“Lemme see your arm,” the hacker repeated, grabbing Freddy’s wrist and pulling at it to view his forearm. “Yeah, see,” he explained, “your arm is thin enough to reach up the slot and pull out whatever you want.”

Ogilvie glanced around to see no one else glancing around. “Try it.”

Freddy shrugged, “Okay.”

Freddy knelt down in front of the machine, slid his forearm into the slot where his two pastries should have been. “Now reach up,” Ogilvie instructed him. Freddy guided his hand up into the vending womb. “Can you feel the packaging?”

“Yeah.”

“Grab it and pull it down.”

Freddy followed the instructions and a Ho-Ho treat slid down into the slot at the bottom. Free. Newborn.

“It worked, it worked,” Freddy exclaimed.

“Shhh, keep it down,” Ogilvie told him, looking around suspiciously.

“I’m gonna get another one.” And he did. Two Ho-Ho’s, twins, sitting in the receptacle. “Do you want anything?” Freddy asked his new best friend.

“Yeah sure, grab me a Snickers.” And there it was… Snickers, à la carte.

This was only the beginning.

Mentor that he was, Ogilvie taught Freddy how to break into other students’ user accounts within the college computer system.

“Y’see, every student has an account on the mainframe where they store all their files. You can’t access the mainframe with an account and you can’t have an account without being enrolled as a student. Now, to access an account, you need the student’s user name and password.”

“Yeah, I know, so how do we get someone’s user name and password?”

“Easy, kid, totally easy. You go to the main terminal room, y’know the one by the atrium?”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“You dig through the garbage for hardcopies of a student’s terminal session. There’re ten terminals there that don’t have monitor screens; they can only display sessions in hardcopy, like typewriters. And some students are stupid. They enter their user name and password and it gets printed right on the paper and, when they’re done, they throw the paper they don’t need in the garbage, with their user name and password still printed on it for all the janitors to see. My dad was a janitor.”

Ogilvie took him to the main terminal room, dug through a large waste paper basket teeming with computer output and managed to find three such examples of user names and their corresponding passwords.

“See, I told ya.”

“What if someone finds out?”

“You don’t get found out if you know what you’re doing. The best place to hide is in Room L238 in the North Wing; there’re only eight terminals in that room and there’s hardly ever anyone in there… Trust me, kid, I haven’t been a student here for a year-and-a-half.”

And that’s how Freddy managed to continue using the computer after his summer student account had been deleted (purged was the word they used back then). July came and went, Freddy played computer games and ate free pastries while his parents worked out their separate ways, August, September. Then came October.

Freddy was on his fourth stolen student account; user name: Philip66. Philip66 had detected the presence of a hacker in his account and had notified the system administrator. His account was promptly shut down (purged) and he was given a new one. Freddy was locked out.

So he paid another visit to Ogilvie’s prized trash can. He hadn’t seen his hacking mentor in a few weeks but there he was, digging for more passwords. Freddy explained how he’d been shut down again by yet another purged account.

Ogilvie handed him a new user name and password from the bin and gave him some advice – inform the student user of your presence with a threat.

Freddy took it to heart and created a file called “readme” in his fifth stolen account. The “readme” file outlined how the student now had a hacker using his account for “peaceful purposes” and if he reported it to anybody, the hacker would “wipe out any existence of you at this shit-ass college.” Terrorism, for lack of a better word.

A few days later, in Room L238 in the North Wing of the campus, Ogilvie showed Freddy something he’d recently discovered. “Look at this,” he said, typing rapidly at a terminal, “I figured out how to break into the mainframe’s access control protocol. See this list?”

A list of numbers appeared on the screen – 02, 03, 07, 12, 13, 21, 29, 50, 52. “These are the terminals that are currently in use all over the campus. See, I’m 52; you’re 50.”

Freddy didn’t really understand what Ogilvie was talking about but whatever, “Yeah sure, I see.”

“Now watch this.” Ogilvie typed in “ENDSESSION/50″ and hit the return key.

Suddenly, Freddy’s terminal shut down. Off, dead, powerless.

“Cool, huh?”

“Yeah, cool,” Freddy responded, turning his terminal back on and restarting the computer game he’d been playing.

About two hours later, around 8:30PM, Freddy was alone in L238. And he was curious. He tried to recall how Ogilvie had broken into the access control protocol (whatever that meant!). After several botched attempts, he was successful.

A list of number appeared on the screen – 02, 03, 07, 09, 13, 24, 50.

“Now how did he do it again?” Freddy asked himself. The dark green cursor blinked at him, as if to say, “The coast is clear.” BLINK – GO! BLINK – GO! BLINK – GO!

He typed in “ENDSESSION/02,03,07,09,13,24″. And without giving it a second thought, he lightly tapped the return key. The only number that remained on the screen was “50″. Him. 50.

“Cool,” he thought, unaware that with great power comes great responsibility. He returned to playing some game, bored, alone, and stupid for remaining at the scene of the cyber-crime. He was twelve, his only excuse.

Ten minutes later, a security guard entered the room, said, “Excuse me,” and typed something on Freddy’s terminal. A list of activities appeared on the screen – everything Freddy had done since Ogilvie had shut him down earlier in the day.

Freddy sat blank-faced as it dawned on him that he’d been caught. The guard escorted him to the Administrator’s office.

“This is him?” the Administrator asked the guard. “Are you sure?” He wore round glasses and tweed.

Outside the office were four professors pacing in anguish, sweating in frustration, cursing to themselves. The Administrator informed Freddy, “These professors outside my office were working on very important reports and when you shut them down, they lost all their work.”

“Maybe they should have saved their work at regular intervals,” Freddy retorted, thereby beginning the word on the street that one must save one’s work at regular intervals.

The Administrator had Freddy banned from the campus. “If we ever see you here again, you’ll be charged with trespassing. Good night.” He was the most polite Administrator ever.

The guard escorted Freddy to the nearest exit, across a campus lawn and down the path to the bus stop.

He never saw Ogilvie again.