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didn’t watch sitcoms, he didn’t watch the news, he didn’t care about the music videos everyone liked to keep up with, except for the occasional heavy metal band. He turned on the TV only to watch sport – any kind of sport. Football, basketball, volleyball, even chess, snooker and golf, when they got this stuff on cable. Matt swore that one day he actually caught Will watching a domino championship, though Will insisted that was just a joke.
    But it was no joke that Will hardly ever spent any time on the internet or chatting with friends online. Most of the time, he was disconnected from the world, playing for hours on end. His favourite gameswere the ones you could play online with friends and that go on for ever, throwing little dice, playing the role of heroes or villains, alternating between tense silences and loud yells.
    The others always thought it would be hard to beat Will, with all that practice he had. He had fast reflexes. That’s why his friends didn’t like playing action games against him. It was no fun any more, because he always won. It didn’t matter whether they were using a controller, a mouse or a keyboard. Will was just a winner.
    The one exception was strategy games. Will was not all that good at games like that, especially at the more advanced stages. He didn’t have a lot of patience. So he’d often get a friend to come over to his place to help him out with the planning, so that he could learn and improve his skills. Someone like Pedro, for instance, who was the kind of person that could stay silent for a long time, analysing the alternatives for a game he was imagining, a game he hadn’t even started to play yet, that only existed in his head.
    Pedro would sometimes interrupt the game, leave the room, make a sandwich, come back eating it, and all the time he would be thinking about his next move. And, in the end, it usually worked.
    It was exciting to have a strong opponent every once in a while. So Will sometimes liked to playagainst Pedro, each in his own house, on different computers. At other times, though, they would just sit down side by side, playing together against the computer. At times like that, Pedro was invaluable. He really improved the chances of winning. And it was at one of these times that the Brainy Hacker decided to strike again.
    The two friends were playing a new game, full of different obstacles. It was on a CD that Will’s godfather had brought back to him from a trip to London. It was set in the Middle Ages, Will’s favourite era, and was full of knights, armour, castles, sieges, jousting, tournaments with flags that waved in the wind, damsels locked in towers, magic potions, dragons, Crusades, illuminated parchments, wizards, spells, dungeons. Loads of stuff. You could play for hours, always with new elements, without it ever becoming repetitive.
    That’s why Pedro went on playing for a while, then a little while longer, and ended up spending the whole of Friday afternoon and evening at Will’s place. And that’s how he happened to see a message that appeared all of a sudden on the screen, totally out of the blue.
    Will was just about to delete it, but Pedro intervened to keep the message on the screen for a few minutes – long enough to read it a couple of times before it all disappeared, when the impatientWill made a quick and unstoppable movement that brought the game back to the main screen.
    â€˜I can’t say I memorised it, but I did pay close attention and I think I can roughly repeat it,’ Pedro was saying to Sonia now, as they walked to Will’s house that Saturday morning.
    Well, Sonia thought, he hadn’t exactly called her up for a Saturday date with a movie and a bite to eat, as she had dared to imagine, full of hope. Still, it was clear that he wanted her company and valued her help in this challenge of trying to track down the hacker.
    â€˜Do you really think it was a new