PREFACE
No one knows exactly when the term "hacker" came into the language, although it was certainly being used in small elite circles of what would eventually become the computer industry as far back as the mid-sixties. Even twenty years ago, few people outside of that fledgling computer industry would have known what you were referring to if you talked of "hackers," and that would have included most avid science fiction fans, and even the majority of science fiction writers—even many of the so called "hard science" SF writers who pride themselves on staying technologically au courant.
By the middle of the seventies, a few of us were vaguely familiar with the basic concept of hacking in its most general sense, although mostly what we heard of in those days were "phone phreaks," a specialized form of hacker who pirates telephone service; as long ago as 1967 or 1968, one of your editors can recall someone telling him about a friend who had made a "black box" or "whistler" that enabled him to make long-distance calls without having to pay for them—but, since this was before even the term "phone phreak" had come into common parlance, there was no word to describe someone who engaged in that sort of activity. "Hacker" had yet to surface from the tightly closed ranks of the cognoscenti.
Today, of course, after the explosive expansion of the computer industry, which has put personal computers into a respectable percentage of all American homes; after the "Cyberpunk" revolution in science fiction, which brought writers such as William Gibson and Bruce Sterling to wide attention outside of traditional genre boundaries; after a follow-up flood of books and stories and comics and even songs and tapes and CDs; after big-budget movies such as Sneakers and War Games, cult movies such as Johnny Mnemonic, and even weekly television shows such as Max Headroom, Nowhere Man, Deadly Games and The X-Files, just about everyone knows what a hacker is, at least in the most commonly accepted sense: someone who illicitly intrudes into computer systems by stealth and manipulates those systems to his own ends, for his own purposes.
Usually, in these scenarios, the hacker is up to no good when he intrudes into those computer systems. Usually, in fact, his goal is to perform an act that is illegal, immoral, or both: to commit a white-collar computer crime (transfer ten million dollars to a personal bank account); to commit an act of espionage, either industrial espionage or the old-fashioned political kind (steal the restricted designs for the new product line, steal the secret plans for the new terror weapon); to commit an act of sabotage or technological terrorism (crash the telephone system or the power grid, make an atomic power plant melt down, cause nuclear-armed missiles to be fired at Someone Somewhere). And so on.
This is, of course, a somewhat limited conception of a hacker. Although some hackers do commit some of the above acts, mostly computer crime and computer fraud of one sort or another (pirating phone services is still big, as is the stealing of other people's credit card numbers), not all hackers are computer criminals, by any means. Many of today's foremost captains of industry were once scruffy teenage hackers, and many of the people who will one day pioneer new industries or new technologies, or explore as yet unimagined new frontiers of scientific knowledge, are scruffy teenage hackers right now. Nor, as the stories in this anthology will show you, are computers the only thing that can be hacked. In the future, for good and ill, clever hackers will be hacking DNA, viruses, or even the basic nature of humanity itself—indeed, some of them have already started doing so.
It should also be kept in mind that hackers are not always driven by venal goals such as money or power. Money, in fact, is often the least potent of a hacker's motives, far outweighed by the desire to discover secret knowledge for its own sake, to explore the parameters of technologies that are new enough that no one as yet can be quite sure what can or cannot be done with them, to push the edge of the envelope . . . and then, when a new edge has been established, further out, to push it again. Hackers are experimenters, not content to passively accept a service as a consumer, always wanting to be in active control—which is why you will find no Virtual Reality or computer-sex stories here (for those, you must go to two other Ace anthologies, Isaac Asimov's Cyberdreams and Isaac Asimov's Skin Deep); instead, hackers are always driven to explore, manipulate, meddle, alter, rearrange, improve, upgrade, adapt, and change things around until they better suit their own needs.
All this, plus the kind of restless, impatient, sometimes amoral or egocentric spirit that chafes at any kind of restriction or boundary, the kind of spirit (either "free" or "outlaw," depending on how you look at it) that bristles resentfully at other people's laws, rules, regulations, and expectations, and relentlessly seeks a way to get over or under or around those rules. The something that does not love a wall. In other words, very much the same sort of spirit that drove the people who, for good and ill, opened up the American West, the kind of spirit that produced far-sighted explorers as well as cattle rustlers and horse thieves, brave pioneers as well as scurvy outlaw gangs, and that built the bright new cities of the Plains at the cost of countless thousands of Native American lives.
Today, poised on the brink of the twenty-first century, society may be about to change again in fundamental ways, and hackers will drive much of that change, for good and ill. Never before has so much power been in the hands of so few, those elite individuals who have the knowledge and the ability to manipulate the very structures that hold society together in this complexly interrelated Information Age. Will they bring the infrastructure of that society crashing in upon itself in flaming ruin, inflicting upon us acts of terrorism on a heretofore unimaginable scale, or will they be the trailblazers who will lead us to a new kind of society, one wherein the individual enjoys more personal freedom—and thus, inevitably, more individual responsibility—than was ever before possible in the history of the human race?
Only time will tell. Only the future will know—but, in the meantime, you can get a taste of that future, or, rather, a taste of one of the many different futures that could come to pass, simply by turning the page, and reading the stories that await you. . . .