Saturday, 4 July 2004 – 23.40

      It was only a set of fingers flying across a keyboard, yet they could work so much malice.

      She watched in awe as her words appeared before her, the letters on the screen keeping pace with her fingers. What was so amazing was how little she had to change to wreak so much damage. All she had to do to alter the behavior of an entire computer program was make minor alterations to just two of the lines of the program. Hackers and ‘midnight programmers’ would laugh at the absurd simplicity of it. Some of them might even have been mildly amused by the sheer audacity of it. But few of them would have condoned her objectives.

      So what?

      She wasn’t doing it for fame or glory. She was doing it for justice – plain, old-fashioned justice.

      As she continued her work, she glanced up and looked out through the window. In the distance she could see the flickering lights of the nocturnal city and they reminded her that there was a world out there beyond her private world of vengeance. But she forced herself to ignore the distraction. Her fingers continued to dance across the keyboard in the small pool of halogen light that fell upon the desk. The rest of the room was in darkness.

      After a few more seconds she paused, satisfied with the results of her labors. Then, with a couple of clicks on the left button of the mouse, it was done. She had created a new version of the program.