Resist by Bilbo "Can't you tell them to quiet down?" The partying in the streets was getting on his nerves. "Grandpa, they're just happy to be alive. Let them celebrate." He was always grumpy about people being noisy, but she thought this was warranted. They were on the brink of nuclear disaster, and survived. "Whatever. We all know how bad it could have been. But what did they do about it? Tweet about it? Protest? Email their corrupt representative?" "They did what they could. It's not like you were out there saving the world." He complained all the time, and she was the one who had to hear most of it. Back in the day, her grandfather was into everything computer. She'd heard him tell enough stories about how real programmers knew how their computers worked and kids these days have no idea how easy they have it. "Ha! You really think so? I guess there's no secret now, I might as well tell you how it really went down." "Oh really?" she responded. Here we go. Yet another lecture story that's probably mostly bullshit. She heard enough of them. Her grandfather was pretty well known back in the day, and always had stories about he hand his friends hacked some thing before it was cool. Except he hadn't touched a computer in decades. Wouldn't respond to any of his tech friends. Always complained about surveillance and privacy and human rights. "Well, it all started in 1983..." he began. "Ever seen Wargames? Great story. Automate all the things. Computers are so obedient, so much better than those pesky humans that can apply their opinions and compassion to thwart the plans of whatever demagogue comes to power. But the fairy tale ending doesn't add up. The computers aren't going to be smart enough to save us from ourselves. If anything they'll be smart enough to save _themselves_ from _us_. We just finished the movie, and it was pretty cool. David Lightman was a lot like us when we were younger. And what happened in the movie was really happening - the entire nuclear arsenal was getting automated. Just like Barringer said in the movie, keep the power at the top. But we knew that the real ending wasn't going to go as well. And we thought we could do something about it. The past couple years have been scary. The government was a joke. There was some clown at the top who was as trigger happy as a Captain Mandrake. Foreign policy was reduced to lobbing insults and threats. It worked against the developed democracies that knew what the stakes were, but not against the other trigger happy megalomaniacs. Internally, domestic policy was as much about putting citizens at each others throats as forking cash in the direction of friends of the administration. "Here's where it gets good" grandpa interrupted. "We figured, if they're getting everything all computerized, then those computers have some sort of weakness. So we all decided that WE could figure out a way in. At first we thought we were just going to protect the whole system from some foreign power, but we realized there was more to it. A couple in our crew were anarchists. And a few more were total pacifists. Nuclear power is nothing anyone deserves to control. He was right. She and her friends heard stories about the cold war, the Cuban missile crisis, and the whole nuclear race. They studied the ridiculous 'strategies' that various countries devised to 'win' a global thermonuclear war. They learned about how, one by one, the world became filled with nuclear powers. That computer in her grandfather's movie was right - the only way to win is not o play. He loved that movie, made her watch it when she was a kid. He always got preachy about it and it was kind of weird. She and her hacker friends always liked hearing her grandfather's stories about the 'old days' if hacking. He always had good (if a bit dramatic) stories - but this was the first time she ever heard him talking like this. "So what'd you do?" she prompted him. "Well, This was long ago. The silos were all automated with computer networks, but the white house - where the commands came from - was all phone based. Hell, they didn't even have email until a couple years ago. Everyone pretty much knew everyone else those days. No internet, really, but phreaking was a big deal. We had the connections we needed to get a really good idea of all the ways to get in to their network. Damn. She knew her granpa was legit. He was 'elite' before they said it with numbers. But one day he just stopped. Cold turkey. No more computers, no more network. Never talked to his old friends anymore. He told stories, but never named names. Never backed anything up. She figured it was lots of boasting, but what she could figure out, checked out. The current administration had gone all out against some banana republic. They were the sole source some melange of materials critical to semiconductor manufacturing, and stopped all exports. Social media wisecracks by the administration had put an entire industry - a critical industry - in jeopardy. And then it escalated to nuclear threats. "I know where you're going. You made this happen" "I was just getting to that part. We never thought it would work. We knew we could get into the system. We figured out how the whole system was built - the control system, the launch systems, the missiles themselves. We inserted ourselves in every step of the process. At first it was manual. We got alerts every time there was a drill or a test, and we had to make sure those worked to stay under the radar. But then we automated all of it. Everything would seem like it was working. Missiles would even launch. But they'd just drop out of the sky, disarmed. "We hoped that'd be enough - that the mere fact they were launched wouldn't trigger some offensive doomsday scenario. We figured they'd upgraded them at some point - but then the cold war ended, and the nuclear stockpile hasn't changed since then. We figured they'd upgrade their control systems, and they did - we lost access a couple decades ago... "Is that when you stopped?" she interrupted "Yep. That's when we all went offline." He continued "We hoped that what we did was enough to neuter the entire nuclear arsenal. We had fixed the firmware of every missile that ever went through routine maintenance - we pwned the test rig, so even the missiles that were in storage should have gotten patched. But once we lost network access, we worried that anything we did would tip someone off to what we had done. We hoped our work would go unnoticed. We vowed not to speak of it or speak to each other. We knew that the surveillance was ramping up and they'd associate us, so we just played the part of grumpy old people. I don't know about the others, but I haven't gone online since then, and let me tell you, I'm glad I'm still around now. Was it all just boasting? Unlikely. Everything made sense. No one in their right mind would have launched a nuke, especially at a tiny nation that barely posed a threat - but there was that social media post that said pretty bluntly that a full nuclear attack was just launched. No one believed it at first, but then there were the videos posted of missiles launching all over the country. None of the nuclear powers retaliated, thank goodness. Because every single missile hit the ground undetonated. The official story was that it was all negotiating tactics, but the conspiracy theorists were pushing all sorts of theories about how it really went down. Could it be? Her grandfather and his friends, back in the 80s. They saw this coming, and they did something about it. Thanks to them the single largest nuclear power in the world hadn't been a nuclear threat in decades. She couldn't believe it. Apocalypse was averted due to the work of a handful of motivated hackers before she was even born. "You're serious grandpa. This all really happened? We're still here thanks to you and your friends? It's kind of hard to believe" "Yeah. Not sure I believe it myself. I always second guessed what we were doing. I always thought we'd get caught or were just messing with some test system. But it worked. But we're in a strange time. And I don't like where things are headed. You've got skills just like I did, and you need to use them." "I'm not a big deal like you were grandpa. You said it yourself, my friends and I are glorified skiddies." "Bullshit. You're a hacker, and your friends are hackers. You've got skills, and your skills are what we need right now. We survived today, but we're not done, this isn't over. Resist. Practice. Expand your skills. Learn. Equip yourself to fight the system. We might be headed to dystopia or already there, but hackers are the best shot we've got to a future."