Evasion

Chapter Two

Four-and-a-half Years Ago

Scotty spent most of the morning that his father died with his nose buried in a book.

The rest of the time, he had mostly been anxious about an appointment that had been scheduled.

He had, of course, driven to Parry Sound to spend the previous day with his parents and be there in the wee morning hours to drive them up in to the city for Lionel Desmond's early morning surgery, but, at the time he had felt as if he were a mere assistant to the whole procedure.

Sure, the surgery had been a serious one – the removal of a kidney with a potentially malignant cyst on it – but explained by the doctors as routine enough that Lionel Desmond might perhaps be going in for a tonsillectomy rather than a nephrectomy.

It wasn't quite day surgery, but it was one in which the man would, after being observed overnight in hospital, be allowed to return home the next day.

So, the dutiful son – although he had, at first been reluctant to play that role – Scotty took the trek north from Toronto to his parent's home. At least, he told himself he was a dutiful son; and his parents fully believed he was being a dutiful son.

What he didn't tell them was that, conveniently, he had hooked up with a potential client online; and, though Scotty was there to play the role of helpful and dutiful son, it had been the lucrative nature of meeting with the client and taking on a new job that had appealed to him most.

Sure, he loved his father; but this was a potential huge cash windfall that he simply couldn't ignore.

Scotty was a seasoned and sought-after hacker.

He had been adept with computers since the very first day that his father brought the computer home from the high school where he worked. It had been a Commodore Pet Computer, among the first "home computers" to be wide distributed and used in various mid-northern high schools across the province.

Scotty had relished in seeing that a simple series of words written in a particular order in a certain format – in this case, the programming language being BASIC with each line of code, a logical statement telling the computer an action to perform denoted in numeral order – you could get this machine to do things.

The first program that had sparked Scotty's imagination was when the teacher had instructed them how to have the computer flash the word "HELLO" to them over and over.

     10 PRINT "HELLO!"

     20 PAUSE 1

     30 CLS

     40 PAUSE 1

     50 GOTO 10

When you ran the program, it would display the characters "HELLO!" on an otherwise blank screen – a series of green letters on a black screen – then a timer would count out exactly one second, then clear the screen, count out another second, then return to the first line of the program and repeat the process.  The result, a flashing "HELLO!" of green letters in the top left hand corner of the otherwise blank black computer screen

The original instructions had been to just type in "HELLO!" but Scotty had figured out he could insert virtually any characters in there, so immediately changed that to "HELLO SCOTTY!"

As his classmates were fooling around with just getting that simple five lines of code to work, Scotty found himself immediately bored and tried to use the basic understanding to create something a little bit more complex.

So he modified it to the following:

     10 PRINT "HELLO SCOTTY!"

     20 PAUSE 3