The Holy Grail

Electron laughed.

‘Hey,’ Phoenix said, ‘we should put in words like “Qwerty” and “ABCDEF” and “ASDFGH”.’

‘Did that already.’ Electron had already put together a list of other common passwords, such as the ‘words’ made when a user typed the six letters in the first alphabet row on a keyboard.

Phoenix started on the list again. ‘OK the COs. Commend, Comment, Commerce, Commercial, Commercialism, Com- mercially. Kill those last three.’

‘Huh? Why kill Commercial?’

‘Let’s just kill all the words with more than eight characters,’ Phoenix said.

‘No. That’s not a good idea.’

‘How come? The computer’s only going to read the first eight characters and encrypt those. So we should kill all the rest.’

Sometimes Phoenix just didn’t get it. But Electron didn’t rub it in. He kept it low-key, so as not to bruise Phoenix’s ego. Often Electron sensed Phoenix sought approval from the older hacker, but it was a subtle, perhaps even unconscious search.

‘Nah,’ Electron began, ‘see, someone might use the whole word, Commerce or Commercial. The first eight letters of these words are not the same. The eighth character in Commerce is “e”, but in Commercial it’s “i”.’

There was a short silence.

‘Yeah,’ Electron went on, ‘but you could kill all the words like Commercially, and Commercialism, that come after Commercial. See?’

‘Yeah. OK. I see,’ Phoenix said.

‘But don’t just kill every word longer than eight characters,’ Electron added.

‘Hmm. OK. Yeah, all right.’ Phoenix seemed a bit out of sorts. ‘Hey,’ he brightened a bit, ‘it’s been a whole ten minutes since my machine crashed.’

‘Yeah?’ Electron tried to sound interested.