Just to see how far he’d allow me to go, I wrote back that I wanted my own account on the system. He created an account for me, even giving me the username I requested: "hacker." Knowing that he’d be keeping the account under surveillance, I just distracted him by poking around at nothing in particular. I was able to locate the code I wanted, but in the end I never tried to download it because the transfer would have taken forever over my 2,400-baud modem.