FUTURES RESEARCH

9020 - THE FAT HYENA - 1998

I like to think of myself above all as a businessman, but you may think that is an unlikely outcome of my background; for I was born in a mud hut and have lived in one ever since. Recently it has been a mud hut like you have never seen, but more of that later. So how did I come to be a businessman? For that we must start many years ago, when I was still a teenager at school.

Even at that time we were not unaware of the outside world. Most of the families living in our small village, on the edge of the Ethiopian plateau, had a sun-powered Japanese transistor radio; though electric power, and with it television, didn't arrive until after the computers did. Yet the lives of my parents followed much the same patterns as those of the many generations of their ancestors. We were fortunate, for most of our fields lay on the plateau itself, next to our farm where we could use oxen to plough them. Just a few, though, lay on the terraces of the escarpment - and these were the bane of my life. Much later I came to recognise the beauty of the spot, with its panoramic views of the valley far into the distance, then I came to choose it for the site of my own home, but in my teens all I could think of was the work it entailed. Every morning of the year I had to scramble down those rough tracks, herding our sheep and goats, before leaving them in the care of my younger brothers. Only then could I make my way to school. The process was reversed in the evening, and I still had my homework to do after that. In the holidays it was even worse, tilling those fields - barely more than shelves scraped out of a sheer rock-face - by hand; for the tracks were too steep for oxen. Then, later in the year, came the backbreaking task of carrying up the loads of grain and, especially, the hay and straw, we harvested.

At the time I hated it and, like all my friends, dreamed of the day when I could escape to the big city; perhaps even to Addis, where you could really enjoy life. Looking back at it, with the nostalgia of an adult caught in the vicious grasp of civilisation, I now recognise that it was an almost perfect childhood; one of the last to avoid the taint of outside contamination. Even at the time, though, I enjoyed school; in which respect I was perhaps unusual. My friends enjoyed parts of it, the games we played and even more the storytelling of strange places far away, but I loved every bit of it. Miss Gebretensai, our teacher, was the love of my life - and I of hers, for what teacher can ignore a pupil who is so desperate to learn that he pursues you endlessly, seeking ever more knowledge - and even asking for more homework! Maybe we did sit on logs and had no desks, and considered ourselves lucky to have a bare tin roof over our heads, but my education could not have been better.

The day the first stranger arrived it got better still. He arrived, bouncing along the main track, in a rather battered jeep - but it looked like a miracle of modern technology to us. We had seen one or two, from the aid agencies, roaring across the plateau in the distance, but this was the first one that had stopped in the village. Its very arrival, strange smells and all, persuaded some of my friends to become mechanics in later life. For most of us, though, its impact was that something of the city had been brought into our lives, to touch them and change them so they would never be the same again. But more, much more, was about to happen; even though, at the time, we were just told to amuse ourselves, examining this strange beast of burden, while its driver disappeared in to the schoolroom with Miss. When they reappeared, an hour or so later, she seemed very nervous, as she explained that we were going to do some tests; and wouldn't that be fun! I suspect she doubted that this would really enthral my friends, for they sincerely loathed most of the tests they were regularly forced to do. But I loved tests. I was not a masochist; it was just so much fun fitting together so many bits of the knowledge I had carefully learned.

In the event, it was even more fun than I expected. The tests were quite different to the ones we were normally confronted by. I found the puzzles easy, and even playing with the words and numbers came almost as easily. Looking around me, I could see that my friends were just as engrossed in their work. Miss needn't have worried, she was a good teacher and we seemed to be good pupils.

The final outcome if this brief interruption in our lives did not come until six months later. The same jeep, with the same driver, came bumping along the track once more; but this time followed by a lorry with two uniformed drivers. Miss rushed to greet them, and I distinctly heard her shriek - I suppose with joy - for we then became the proud possessors of the first personal computer along the whole plateau.

The computer itself was scarcely a problem; though we, for by then we were all involved in the noisy negotiations, had difficulty finding a spot in the classroom where it would not get wet in the rainy season. Depending upon the wind direction, the rain drove in from different - unglazed - windows, or dripped down from the holes in the roof. Our lessons in those months of the year became a shifting huddle of children, constantly on the move to find a dry spot. No, the real trouble was the power supply. In the cities you are as used to plugging in your electrical equipment as you are to turning on the tap for water. Neither of these luxuries was available in our humble community; the nearest examples were more than a hundred miles away. Indeed, the highlights of our annual pilgrimage to the markets in that town were to gape at the waterfalls of pure water in its central square and the brilliance of the lights which kept night away; and, above all, to watch the shadowy figures on the television glimpsed through the door of the only bar which owned one. The two workers, for they were more than just drivers, took some time - well into the next day - struggling to fix sheets of photo-cells onto the roof, and then building a waterproof enclosure for the batteries. So it was not until the following evening that, waiting with barely concealed impatience, we were rewarded by the spectacle of the driver of the jeep testing the computer itself. Even the rows of meaningless figures, which then appeared, on the screen excited us and, when suddenly a coloured picture flared into existence, we could hold back no more and clapped in unison.

That machine became the centre of my life. To a lesser extent it was also the centre of the school's life. But I became almost obsessed by it. Every evening, after I had brought in the sheep and goats, I returned to the schoolhouse to explore a world I had never known existed. When, a year later, our progress - to become the top school in the region - was rewarded with a satellite dish and access to the web, I was in seventh heaven. Thus it was that I came to live more in cyberspace than on earth; for in cyberspace I was just as privileged as anyone else. Yet I still lived in a mud hut, and brought in the sheep and goats! It was my lifeline, and that of my friends, to an education that would have been impossible without it. With it, though, I had all the advantages that other children, even in the largest cities, had. And I had one even greater advantage; I knew its value, where they were so used to it that they almost scorned it.

It was not surprising, in view of the importance I attached to the machine, that I started to learn - and use - the various computer languages long before I was supposed to. With no other outlet for my talents, I became the archetypal hacker. Indeed, just knowing I was entering where I was not supposed to be gave me a kick. I, in my mud hut, could slip into all the cyberpalaces and examine the riches stored there. Of course, there has been a lot of twaddle written about hacking into secure machines. I am flattered by the people who believe I can break unbreakable passwords, but none of us can. Finding the key to these passwords is, therefore, an exercise in trawling the under-side of the net, making friends with the unlikeliest of people and hoping they will pass you through the underground until you hit paydirt; the thrilling moment when a fresh contact gives you the key to a new empire of data. The real world of the hacker finally opens, though, when you enter that door and are welcomed by the system manager itself. Once in, though, you have to find your way around a veritable jungle of data; without any map. At first I found the intellectual challenge of just being there sufficient, it was like a computer game - but the with added excitement of possible discovery.

Such is the pinnacle of most hacking; just being there, much like a traveller sunning himself on a foreign beach, and perhaps leaving a few graffiti to tell others about it. I became, though, the exception. I wanted to use what I found there; not in any criminal way, though I suppose I was already trespassing, but to improve myself as part of my education, and then to garner the knowledge I loved but which seemed to others to be worthless. And all the time I was extending my programming skills, learning new languages, new tricks of the trade; and above all starting to write programs as pure language, speaking them so fluently that I no longer thought of them as intellectual exercises. The lines of code just flowed from beneath my fingertips.

So it came about that, at the tender age of thirteen but pretending to be eighteen - who can tell what age you are on the text-based web, I landed my first programming contract. It was ludicrously simple, for me at least, writing just one section of code for a small supermarket chain that wanted to mine the databases just like its bigger brethren. I felt ten feet tall; I was a professional programmer! Not only that, as I found out, I was a member of a team of sophisticated individuals - almost all from the cities of the West - and accepted as an equal. Thus began my secret life, for I did not dare tell anyone about it. Those in my village would have thought me deranged in even attempting the work, and those on the web would have dropped me at even a hint of my true age and background. It was secret I kept well, pretending that I was a student moonlighting at Addis University. It was a cover that worked well for a decade, until my cover was eventually broken.

At that time, though, I had to keep pinching myself to make certain I wasn't dreaming. But it was fortunate that I was already such a good programmer, for each night I had to finish what was supposed to be four hours of part-time programming work in just the hour so I had after collecting the sheep and goats!  I was so confident, with all the patter I had learned from other programmers, that it came as a great shock when - at the end of the first month - I was asked for details of my bank account; so they could pay me for my work! I had never thought about this, simply being allowed to do the work was reward enough; indeed, if I could have afforded it I would have paid them for the experience. Yet here they were, asking to give me more money than the whole village saw in a year; five thousand creds, no less, and I had never before held even a single cred in my hand! The next few hours were frantic. First I had to hack into a bank, any bank, but I had never done this before; I had always worried that, once inside, I would not be able to resist the temptations there. Now I desperately needed a password; not to take money out but to put it in! But the whole world seemed to be asleep, and nobody could give me one; until, finally, someone let me into one in Nepal. I had never even heard of Nepal, and here I was with a bank account there. Only then was I able to give the details to my new paymasters, and in a moment I became richer than I could have ever imagined - even if I could think of no way to use that money. I simply had to bank it in order to continue with the work I loved. I still have that bank account, now along with several hundred others, and - despite never having seen the place - I think of Nepal as my second home - after all, it's a poor mountainous country just like my own.

Over the next there years I built my reputation as a whiz-kid programmer - not for my productivity, for nobody knew how little time I had available for such work, but because I was able to unravel complex problems which others couldn't even start on. And, as my reputation was spread, by those I worked with on the various special projects, I was asked to undertake more and more sophisticated work; at ever higher prices. I was even offered the job of running a team of my own - but I doubted that my cover would stand up to that. Even so, the money I was paid gradually accumulated, to levels which I found unbelievable; and my bank account began to look more like the whole country's gold reserve. By the time I was sixteen, believe it or not, it held more than a million dollars. This was when I first started spreading it around; a few tens of thousands in one bank, and then in another, and another. I simply could do nothing else with it. I still had told nobody about my secrete life. Even Miss, who knew how much time I spent at the keyboard each day, thought I was wasting my youth on computer games, as other teenagers did. I suppose I was, in one sense, doing just that - but with real life!

Eventually I had to talk to someone about it. But I couldn't talk to anyone in my own village, not even to Miss and certainly not to my parents, because they wouldn't have been able to comprehend what I was saying. So I eventually plucked up the courage to talk to the fixer - Joel - who had, over the years, come to act almost as my agent. Although we had never met, or even seen each other, we constantly talked to each other through the net. In this way, we had become the best of friends; after all he had made a small fortune himself from the work he had placed with me. But, above all, we trusted each other. Even so, it was incredibly difficult broaching the subject with him that first time. It took me more than a week, and a number of false starts, before I told him the truth - all the truth! All that time I was terrified that my wonderful world would come tumbling down around my ears.

I did it by email; I certainly couldn't face a voice transmission, so I didn't immediately know what his reaction was. I suspect he was stunned, but he now claims he roared with laughter. My world didn't collapse. Indeed, Joel and I created a new one - with him taking ten percent off the top as every agent does. I was due to leave school, and the scouts from Addis University were already making suitable noises to me over the net, but - I ask you - if you can make a million dollars that easily what extra would a degree add!

But, remember, nobody in the village knew; and I still couldn't bring myself to tell them. It was silly, but my two lives were so far apart that I just couldn't pull them together; and I didn't want to. But I could, at least, get rid of those damned sheep and goats and spend all my time doing the work I loved. But how exactly to do it? The idea we finally worked up was simple in principle, but devilishly complex to put into practice. We set up a front company, offering data entry and personal/home management; the below stairs work of the new information age - which was then being subcontracted to the developing world, though rarely to as remote communities as our own. This was easy to do for, after all, Joel's main work was placing programming; and extending this to data entry was not difficult - even if much less profitable. Setting up a local operation in Ethiopia was more difficult, Joel even had to get on a plane and visit Addis to recruit the key staff. Even more difficult was explaining to them why the first operation had to be located in one small village on the plateau! They could see that it would be much easier to run it for the street outside the office, but he eventually succeeded - he is a smooth tongued bastard - so well that we now also have a very profitable offshoot with branches in almost every village throughout Africa! Of course I could not handle any of this face to face work, but Joel really earned his commission; and I think he enjoyed the experience, not least because of its clandestine nature.

The first personal contact I had with the operation was when another jeep appeared in the village. This time, though he didn't know it, the driver was working for me. He had come to recruit our brightest students for work on a remote data-entry scheme. They, and Miss, were almost ecstatic. All of them had resigned themselves to the idea of remaining dirt-farmers, or perhaps getting a job on one of the assembly lines which were springing up in nearby towns. But the joy of becoming part of the information society without even leaving home was almost too much to bear. I was almost as thrilled, but for quite different reasons. Now I could start to do something with all that money. I made certain I was not at the head of the queue, after all I was confident that - when my forms came back from Addis - I would be hired! But I also made certain that I put my name forward to host the ground station; for, once more, the link to the outside world would be through a satellite - though it would now be my personal one, not one owned by the government.

After a discrete interval, a couple of months - I didn't want it to look anything special, the crew arrived to install the ground station, and to string cables all over the village; linking up all the computers which now resided in my friend's huts. It was not obvious to them, for my own set-up looked pretty much the same as theirs, but the ground station enclosure now also housed my own computer complex; which was as powerful as money could buy. When we switched on the computer network the whole village celebrated. They celebrated even more when the first payday arrived, a month later. We suddenly became the richest villagers in the province, and I got my own first payment after three years hard work! It was small, no more than anybody else's was, but it was mine.

It was two years later that I built my new house on the escarpment. Of course it was still partly built out of mud, but the ground station now took up a much larger element; including an office for the area supervisor - me! Until then I had been able to count on nobody understanding what I was really doing; the symbols on my screen didn't look too different to those on anybody else's. But those others had now been initiated in to the mysteries of IT, and were starting to know better; so I needed to hide it away from their eyes. Much of it was a conceit, though, partly because I still liked living in a mud hut; it was cool in summer but warm in winter, and had evolved through centuries of development by my ancestors. It was as finely tuned a living environment as any - though I do admit that the wall of windows, offering a spectacular view of the valley below, was a worthwhile addition. I had also moved on, in cyberspace, to an even bigger league, and my customers now wanted to see me; and so I had needed a video set-up, albeit one hidden behind the two way mirror in front of my desk. The wall behind me was suitably painted blue, my favourite colour I claimed, but actually needed for the chromo-key effects; which showed for the benefit of televisitors. The setting could be an executive office, or a magnificent mansion, or whatever I desired - it did not fool everyone, but many of my peers used similar installations so it wasn't out of character. In any case, I needed some plush backgrounds, for the millions of dollars I had by then accumulated were constantly on the move; being put to ever more profitable uses.

In particular, despite the time I had to devote to programming, I had always kept up my interest in information for its own sake. In fact, as it turned out, this was the most valuable investment of all! I have, you see, also become a live agent. Software agents are all very well, but a live agent, if he or she is clever enough and cheap enough, can knock spots off them when the more complex tasks are put out to global tender. And, an African in his mud hut couldn’t come cheaper; for that - paradoxically- is what the chromo-key often showed, since that is what my new my clients expected. They expected to see an African, dressed in his tribal robes - another conceit - and who was I to deny them that. Of course, it meant that they wildly underestimated my abilities; and that was the source of the extra riches I then accumulated. Indeed, I suppose I was cheap, though I personally worked as fast as any three other live agents, and hence earned three times what they did. And I subcontracted out much of the rest to others in the village. And my outgoings were a lot less than those poor wretches, who were my clients, cooped up in the big cities they liked to call home.

Above all, I was, in effect, paid mainly in kind; with free data. The punters did not know this, but when I was pursuing their investigations - which quite legitimately took me to the great data-stores around the world - I quietly added pieces of knowledge to my own database. The run down terminal on my desk, which they thought they saw, was really just the gateway to the state of the art servers in the other room. In those machines' memories I was gradually building an unrivaled store of information; which I was already starting to market through the web. Of course, I used an entirely different pseudonym for that work. Indeed, I used a completely different identity and location for this work! As I have already pointed out, a blue chromo-key wall looks mud-colored, in the worst African taste for those clients who expect that, but in an instant - electronically - becomes the most sophisticated Western office; all at a touch of a button.

The business was starting to flow in. Once more there was an element of conceit, I charged little for the raw data, but a lot more for my skills in interpreting it. As a result, the word spread once more, but to a different client set. My latest skills were again being recognized. So I could sit there in my mud hut, surrounded by the latest high-tech equipment, living in an idyllic environment; while the punters - sweating in their awful cities - beat an electronic path to my door. Life was sweet.

I liked best the cool of the morning. Then I could climb the mountains behind my house, under the clearest of blue skies, to look out over the valley - and to marvel at its beauty. It had been like this - almost unchanging - since time immemorial. Our ancestors had tilled exactly the same fields; though the terracing undertaken in the last century had subtly changed their contours and the lush green vegetation dramatically demonstrated the success of this communal venture. Even more dramatic were the woods which they also planted, and which now clothed the hillsides. Majestic eucalyptus trees stood out, but it was the humbler coppices, underneath them, which provided the raw material for the charcoal industry on which many of the unskilled workers in the villages nearby depended. The view really was beautiful; both in the pleasure its rich patterns provided for the eye and in the symbols of a community - rich in all the values I cherished - which it contained. I would have lived nowhere else - and fortunately I didn’t have to.

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