UNDERGROUND

home computer. And that was just the dictionary. The most sophisticated cracking programs also produced ‘intelligent guesses’ of passwords. For example, the program might take the user’s name and try it in both upper- and lower-case letters. It might also add a ‘1’ at the end. In short, the program would create new guesses by permutating, shuffling, reversing and recombining basic information such as a user’s name into new ‘words’.

‘It’s 24 000 words. Too damn big,’ Electron said. Paring down a dictionary was a game of trade-offs. The fewer words in a cracking dictionary, the less time it was likely to take a computer to break the encrypted passwords. A smaller dic- tionary, however, also meant fewer guesses and so a reduced chance of cracking the password of any given account.

‘Hmm. Mine’s 24 328. We better pare it down together.’

‘Yeah. OK. Pick a letter.’

‘C. Let’s start with the Cs.’

‘Why C?’

‘C. For my grandmother’s cat, Cocoa.’

‘Yeah. OK. Here goes. Cab, Cabal. Cabala. Cabbala.’ Electron paused. ‘What the fuck is a Cabbala?’

‘Dunno. Yeah. I’ve got those. Not Cabbala. OK, Cabaret. Cabbage. Fuck, I hate cabbage. Who’d pick Cabbage as their password?’

‘A Pom,’ Electron answered.

‘Yeah,’ Phoenix laughed before continuing.

Phoenix sometimes stopped to think about Force’s warning, but usually he just pushed it to one side when it crept, unwel- comed, into his thoughts. Still, it worried him. Force took it seriously enough. Not only had he stopped associating with Electron, he appeared to have gone very, very quiet.

In fact, Force had found a new love: music. He was writing and performing his own songs. By early 1990 he seemed so busy with his music that he had essentially put The Realm on ice. Its members took to congregating on a machine owned by another Realm member, Nom, for a month or so.