y lasted for
hours, over long, elaborate campaigns that might be pursued for months
on end) then they would achieve new skills, new knowledge, new power.
They would acquire and hone new abilities, such as marksmanship,
karate, wiretapping, or Watergate burglary. They could also win
various kinds of imaginary booty, like Berettas, or martini shakers, or
fast cars with ejection seats and machine-guns under the headlights.

As might be imagined from the complexity of these games, Urvile's
gaming notes were very detailed and extensive. Urvile was a
"dungeon-master," inventing scenarios for his fellow gamers, giant
simulated adventure-puzzles for his friends to unravel. Urvile's game
notes covered dozens of pages with all sorts of exotic lunacy, all
about ninja raids on Libya and break-ins on encrypted Red Chinese
supercomputers. His notes were written on scrap-paper and kept in
loose-leaf binders.

The handiest scrap paper around Urvile's college digs were the many
pounds of BellSouth printouts and documents that he had snitched out of
telco dumpsters. His notes were written on the back of misappropriated
telco property. Worse yet, the gaming notes were chaotically
interspersed with Urvile's hand-scrawled records involving ACTUAL
COMPUTER INTRUSIONS that he had committed.

Not only was it next to impossible to tell Urvile's fantasy game-notes
from cyberspace "reality," but Urvile himself barely made this
distinction. It's no exaggeration to say that to Urvile it was ALL a
game. Urvile was very bright, highly imaginative, and quite careless
of other people's notions of propriety. His connection to "reality"
was not something to which he paid a great deal of attention.

Hacking was a game for Urvile. It was an amusement he was carrying
out, it was something he was doing for fun. And Urvile was an
obsessive young man. He could no more stop hacking than he could stop
in the middle of a jigsaw puzzle, or stop in the middle of reading a
Stephen Donaldson fantasy trilogy. (The name "Urvile" came from a
best-selling Donaldson novel.)

Urvile's airy, bulletproof attitude seriously annoyed his
interrogators. First of all, he didn't consider that he'd done
anything wrong. There was scarcely a shred of honest remorse in him.
On the contrary, he seemed privately convinced that his police
interrogators were operating in a demented fantasy-world all their own.
Urvile was too polite and well-behaved to say this straigh