Friday. Coding day.

I've been at it since 8 this morning and it's pushing 4pm now. Got a shitload done on GhostMind, which means I've spent most of the day staring at code while cycling through the proper programming background noise.

Hackers.

Swordfish.

And now WarGames for roughly the 10,000th damn time.

Then the Space Needle showed up.

A few seconds later, David Lightman.

And my Gen X brain immediately wandered somewhere completely unrelated to what I was supposed to be doing.

David Lightman and Dade Murphy lived in Seattle at the same damn time.

WarGames is 1983. David's sitting in his bedroom with an IMSAI, wardialing random numbers, accidentally breaking into WOPR and damn near starting World War III because he wanted to play some unreleased computer games.

Five years later, 11-year-old Dade Murphy, aka Zero Cool, crashes 1,507 systems and causes a 7-point drop in the New York Stock Exchange.

In Seattle.

David would've been around 22.

And the computer underground in 1988 wasn't exactly Facebook. BBSes. Computer stores. Arcades. User groups. Wardialers. That world was SMALL.

You cannot convince me David Lightman wouldn't have been a damn legend.

Imagine Dade growing up hearing stories about the Seattle kid who wardialed his way into a military supercomputer.

"You think crashing 1,507 systems is impressive, kid? There was this dude named Lightman..."

Hell, maybe David was part of the reason Dade became Zero Cool.

Or David meets him after the Zero Cool stunt, looks at this absolutely insane 11-year-old hacker and thinks:

"Oh shit. This kid is me."

Somewhere in an alternate Gen X cinematic universe, WarGames and Hackers are connected.

And I want that damn movie.

HACK THE PLANET!