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interrupt the timing systems used in rogue nuclear programs’. That’s seriously what it says. The moment I read that, it was like a nerd orgasm.
    Ironically, Ducnet, otherwise known as Thruware, otherwise known as Bloodhound or Aardvark, has only ever been used to track down photographs of job candidates doing bucket bongs on Instagram accounts they thought they’d deleted.
    But in fact Thruware was written with another project in mind, one it began weeks ago, which is wholly separate from my job job and which it completed today. And here’s me, I didn’t even notice when I looked at the displays.
    Rain pummels the window, harmonises with the escalating kettle. I’m about to wash a second mug, an activity I call ‘cleaning up’, when all of a sudden I feel compelled to check the terminals again. This is not a sixth sense, merely the unease I get when I’m not at my desk.
    The kettle in the kitchen is screaming. I don’t hear it because of what’s onscreen:
    1 result(s) found
    Below it, in green text against the black of the Thruware interface, in a living room blasted by heat, in a block of flats where all of the residents live alone, in what must be the coldest, bitterest suburb of all of Melbourne, shine eight green numerals:
    0398734378
    They settle in my brain and I look to my phone, feel the urge to dial the number, as strong as the urge to answer when it rings.
    But I don’t.
    The kettle clicks off. The chair sighs slowly as I sit.
    The mad thing I do next is write the number down on a post-it note, in case a power surge wipes it out somehow, or I lose my connection and the back-up connection and the script corrupts. Then I check I’ve written it down correctly. Then I look back through the query fields to be sure I didn’t error there, that this is what it claims to be. But of course it is. I spent months curating the fields for just this reason—so I would know the number was right if it ever showed up all coy and unassuming in the bottom left corner of my display.
    From the home screen it’s clear that the target application was Roadside Samaritan, one of eighty-seven granddaddy datacentres that Thruware can exploit because some IT guys don’t get paid enough to salt their hashes. To find out more I have to launch the botlog.
    20120713 10:24:37:59 L2TP traffic for gy7, interface: 9, protocol: 0, privateRoute: 9 :)
    20120713 10:24:37:59 Connect: iii/ <-> address added. Destination: 19.24.78.92 :)
    20120713 10:24:37:71 traffic hold. Exploit commenced. DNS address. 45.990.00 :)
    20120713 10:24:37:88 traffic clearing for gy8, interface: 9, protocol: 0, privateRoute 9 :)
    20120713 10:24:38:06 traffic filter cancelled, exploit resolved, retrieval p07::%lo07, link#1 :)
    I know it’s kind of douchey to generate a smiley face at the end of every active line of response code, but the log is UTC divided into milliseconds, which means millions of entries, and I don’t have to sort them if I can just search for the smileys.
    Reviewing the botlog is, usually, my favourite part of Thruware: watching the magic unfurl in slowmotion. Electronic pulses over the course of, in this case, forty-seven one-hundredths of a second, spanned out for me in prose poetry. It’s like time travel, watching past events at the speed of brain.
    But the first fantasy crashes over me like a wave of valium. I hadn’t expected it so soon. I wanted more time. To consider things, to cost-benefit the crap out of the decision before I made it. Have I made it? Am I really about to call this number?
    I tip back in my chair, can’t prevent what happens next. Also, I can’t deny that, actually, this is my favourite part. The fantasy. The mental holodeck.
    By the time I remember I’m hungry, my chips have gone cold.

7
    The view from the conference room is grey and low, looming cloud. In summer you can sit in rooms like this and gawp at the tennis courts on the roofs of the CBD, wonder what happens to the errant balls that make it over the