The Green Blade

While staying at his house for court-mandated weekend visitation, my father, George, had banned me from entering the “adult fiction” section at the library. This was after catching me with Anne McCaffrey’s The Rowan. George wasn’t much of a reader himself, but had flipped through it after noticing the character on the cover had visible nipples, I guess? He found it thoroughly inappropriate, given there’s an (implied) sex scene or two - and to be fair, it isn’t the kind of thing preteens should read.

Still, I was terribly despondent about the whole thing. I’d gotten tired of reading The Boxcar Children and Goosebumps because those are hard to sink into after you’ve tasted McCaffrey and the like. The library was only a block or so from George’s house. I ended up wandering to the adult nonfiction sections, particularly those about computers and technology. After all, I was already deeply enmeshed in the growing parallel universe of America Online…

Sure, there were some early-90s rudimentary “How to Computer” books there, and I burned through them pretty fast, like most kids would. There were some about programming languages that I skimmed over, being decidedly too young to appreciate them, I guess. I wouldn’t start learning HTML until I was twelve.

I discovered dozens of books about the history of cyberspace and information technology, too, though! Many of these detailed the lives of notorious figures with audacious acts. They weren’t novels, but they were packed with amazing events that had actually happened, things I’d never imagined.

The internet was still a pretty wild place, and had been even wilder in the 1980s and earlier 1990s. I was dazzled by stories of people like Kevin Mitnick, John Draper, and others known as much for their arrest records as their cybersecurity knowledge. At the time, it was all incredibly fascinating, even if a kid at that age didn’t understand much of the details. The very fact that John Draper had been able to get free payphone calls with a whistle would live rent-free in my head for many years.

Coincidentally, at some point that summer, the SciFi Channel (back when it was still called that) decided to show the movie Hackers on a Sunday night or something. The movie, in case you haven’t seen it, isn’t even good, but it definitely poured fire on an open flame. In my preteen eyes, nothing seemed cooler than being a playful hacker of some sort.

Enter the Green Blade.

The Green Blade was a notorious hacker and mercenary spy in the messy world of 1990s gray hat cybersecurity and international relations. She was extremely short, and it was unclear what she looked like, because she typically concealed herself, a bit like a supervillain, wearing a hoodie or balaclava. There was exactly one sketch of her, an artist’s (my) depiction, poorly-drawn, but capturing her shadiness and general mystique on notebook paper with frayed edges.

The Green Blade wasn’t well-known outside of the usual circles, but she was well-respected within them. Sometimes, she worked alongside organizations like the Central Intelligence Agency or Federal Bureau of Investigation, but at other instances, she opposed them in byzantine machinations.

The Green Blade wasn’t really a villain, though. She was just mischievous, like so many of the hackers I’d read about in those books (seemed to me, at least).

Of course, the Green Blade wasn’t real, either. She was a fictional character I invented to kill boredom. Some kids pretend they’re astronauts, mermaids, or soldiers. A boy in my third grade class spent the entire spring at recess playacting as the president with middling social success. Another girl had a sort of “opera singer” alter ego she would sometimes talk about. I developed (quite privately, though) an elaborate mythology about a famous hacker.

Don’t get me wrong - I didn’t run around pretending to hack things. I was too old to go that far; I just developed the story in secret. Some of it, I scrawled in the bundles of filler paper I could get for fifty cents from the vending machine in the lobby at school the autumn. I took elaborate measures to keep it from being read by teachers and other students, including throwing away large portions of it at the drop of a hat. Still, it kept me occupied and entertained for a season.

I didn’t understand much at all about real hacking, how it worked, or anything like that (at the time). At the time, I hadn’t even picked up any HTML yet. I was enthralled by those stories of the legendary hackers, though, and built narratives similar. Maybe I couldn’t take down Citibank or whistle to get free phone calls, but as a preteen, I liked to daydream about that kind of thing, and then some.

And no, I never became a hacker. As the months progressed, the Green Blade slowly faded from my consciousness and became a mere echo. After a couple years of messing around on America Online, I would actually pick up HTML, and ultimately CSS too, creating my first websites and other things. Not exactly hacking, but I found it exciting nonetheless. I knew I wasn’t really built to be a hacker, unlike my alter ego there - I’m vaguely clever, but nowhere near that clever, and I couldn’t trust myself not to end up with the ATF on my lawn ready to take me into custody.

The Green Blade, whoever she was, would’ve made an excellent heroine (or villain!) for a late-1990s procedural show, though…