UNDERGROUND
Anthrax scooped up all the papers and piled them into heavy- duty garbage bags, three of which could just fit inside the room at any one time. Anthrax always knew roughly where he had 'filed' a particular set of notes. When he needed it, he tipped the bag onto the floor, searched through the mound and returned to the computer. When the sea of paper reached a critical mass, he jammed everything back into the garbage bag again.
The computer - an Amiga 500 box with a cheap Panasonic TV as the monitor - sat on a small desk next to his mother's sewing machine cabinet. The small bookcase under the desk was stuffed with magazines like *Compute* and *Australian Com- munications*, along with a few Commodore, Amiga and Unix reference manuals. There was just enough space for Anthrax's old stereo and his short-wave radio. When he wasn't listening to his favourite show, a hacking program broadcast from a pirate station in Ecuador, he tuned into Radio Moscow or the BBC's World Service.
Anthrax considered what to do with System X. This system had aroused his curiosity and he intended to visit it frequently.
It was time to work on the login patch. The patch replaced the system's normal login program and had a special feature: a master password. The password was like a diplomatic passport. It would let him do anything, go anywhere. He could login as any user using the master password. Further, when he logged in with the master password, he wouldn't show up on any log files - leaving no trail. But the beauty of the login patch was that, in every other way, it ran as the normal login program. The regular computer users - all three of them - could login as usual with their passwords and would never know Anthrax had been in the system.
He thought about ways of setting up his login patch. Installing a patch on System X wasn't like mending a pair of jeans. He couldn't just slap on a swath from an old bandanna and quick-stitch it in with a thread of any colour. It was more like mending an expensive cashmere coat. The fabric needed to be a perfect match in colour and texture. And because the