"Ya, Captain Crunch. He blew the plastic whistle from a Captain Crunch cereal box into the phone," the Flying Dutchman held an invisible whistle to his lips. "And it opened up an inside line to make long distance calls. Then he built and sold Blue Boxes which recreated the tones to make free calls." "Phreaking and computer hacking, they're the same?" "Ya, ya, especially for the older hackers." The Flying Dutchman patted himself on the stomach. "You see hacking, some call it cracking, is taking a system to its limit. Exploring it, master- ing the machine. The phones, computers, viruses, it's all hack- ing. You understand?" "Spook called hacking a technique for investigating new spontane- ously generated lifeforms. He said a network was a living being. We got into quite an argument about it." Scott sounded mildly derisive of the theory. The Dutchman crossed his arms, grinned wide and rocked back and forth on his heels. "Ya, ya. That sounds like the Spook. Cutting to the heart of the issue. Ya, you see, we all have our reasons why we hack, but ya, Spook is right. We forget sometimes that the world is one giant computer, with thousands and millions of arms, just like the brain. The neurons," he pointed at his head, "are connected to each other with synapses. Just like a computer network." The Flying Dutchman's explanation was a little less ethereal than the Spook's and Scott found himself anticipating further enlight- enment. "The neuron is a computer. It can function independently, but because it's capacity is tiny, a neuron is really quite limited in what it can achieve alone. The synapse is like the network wire, or phone company wiring. It connects the neurons or com- puters together." The Dutchman spoke almost religiously as he animatedly drew wires and computers in the air to reinforce the concept. "Have you heard of neural networks?" "Absolutely," Scott said. "The smart chips that can learn." "Ya, exactly. A neural network is modeled after the brain, too. It is a very large number of cells, just like the brain's cells, that are only connected to each other in the most rudimentary way." "Like a baby's brain?" Scott offered. "Ya, ya, just like a baby. Very good. So like the baby, the neural net grows connections as it learns. The more connections it makes, the smarter it gets." "Both the baby and the network?" "Ya," Dutchman laughed. "So as the millions of neural connec- tions are made, some people learn skills that others don't and some computers are better suited to certain tasks than others. And now there's a global neural network growing. Millions more computers are added and we connect them together, until any computer can talk to any other computer. Ya, the Spook is very much right. The Network is alive, and it is still learning."