Escape KeyThat morning Dairine had awakened with the Oath's words ringing in her ears to find herself not in a galaxy far far away, but in her own bed. She had lain there for a long few minutes in bitter annoyance before she heard the wheels of the truck in the driveway. It was the computer, of course: and to this lesser excitement she had gratefully surrendered herself. Dairine was good with computers. It was just one more kind of knowledge, good for using to keep people and the World off your back; and computers were really surprisingly easy to work with once you got it through your head that they were utterly stupid things, unable to do anything you didn't tell them how to do, in language they understood. In her few months' work with the Apples at school, Dairine had become an accomplished hacker.She utterly disdained the "phreaking," the breaking and entering of elec-tronic bulletin boards and systems that interested a few of her malicious classmates. It could get you thrown in jail. What fascinated Dairine was advanced programming, the true hacking—getting a computer to sing, or talk, or play involved and clever games, or make you a sandwich. All thesethings were possible, with the right peripherals and a smart programmer. That she was; and the computer—tireless listener, absolutely obedient to orders, and endlessly forgiving of mistakes—was the perfect companion. They worked well together. Even her teachers had noticed that the machines "behaved" better around Dairine than around anyone else. She never noticed this herself, having taken it for granted.So while her mother and father sat arguing over the manuals, of course Dairine took matters into her own hands. The Apple IIIc+ was easy to set up: a plug and cable for the screen, the printer cable attached to the printer port and the computer's interface; the power cord to the wall. DairinЈ slipped a system disk into the drive, shut the drive door, and turned the computer on, "booted it up"—ready to look for the "Copy" utility in the disk's directory. The first thing you always did with a brand-new system disk
