Loving Little Egypt

Mourly Vold had discovered how to use his telephone as a scientific instrument, a sharp-tipped probe to investigate the organization of the telephone networks.  Once he had directed himself out of the local exchange, he could send himself wherever he wanted to go by speaking to the operators in their own language.  He made contact with the traffic service engineers, the route managers, the local office technicians [...] They answered his questions and explained things to him.  [...]  With benefit of these tutorials, the organization of the telephone system grew clearer in his mind's eye.  They had constructed it with an open path, a paved highway even, for an invader.  He saw himself standing on this highway with nothing in his way.  He could race up and down as much as he liked, and he could bring his friends in to enjoy the freedom, too.  Why had they taken so few precautions against him?  They had assumed that no one would ever be interested.

-- from Loving Little Egypt by Thomas McMahon, 1987

Loving Little Egypt is the second novel by the late Thomas McMahon, a Professor of Applied Mechanics and biology at Harvard University.  It tells the story of Mourly Vold, aka "Little Egypt," a blind phone phreak who wants only to explore the telephone network and get the phone company to fix what's broken about it.  In the process he and his pals discover adventure, love, betrayal, and revenge.  Loving Little Egypt is fantasy: although McMahon says up front that it was inspired by the 1971 Esquire article, the phreaks have been transplanted to the 1920s, where Mourly -- who seems to be a blend of real-life phone phreaks Joybubbles and John Draper -- gets to play with fanciful network equipment ("Z trunks") and pal around with the likes of Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, and Nikolai Tesla.  It gets the vibe right, though, and (presciently for 1987) nails issues that still plague us today, such as how to deal with security vulnerabilities:

"Why have you been trying so hard to get our attention?  What's your message?" asked Bertram Fairchild, the President of the phone company.

"I came here to show you that your new in-band signaling system equipment can be manipulated by anybody who can click his tongue," Mourly Vold told him.  "I'm willing to help you fix it, but it will be a big job ... It's badly built."

"I don't agree it's badly built," Fairchild said.

"It's vulnerable."

"Only to you," Fairchild said.  "If you really feel as protective towards it as you say you do, you could agree to be discreet with that information."

"I could," Mourly Vold said, "but that would do no good at all.  The cat is out of the bag.  What I found, another person could.  You don't need to fix me. You need to fix the networks.  I don't know what could be plainer than that."

(My emphasis, by the way; I think that is one of the clearest statements about technology, security, and human nature I've seen.)

It's a good read -- better than I expected, to be honest -- and surprisingly touching in places.  Worth checking out.

P.S., Other than Tandem Rush (which I've not read), Loving Little Egypt is the only phone-phreak themed novel I'm aware of.  Please let me know if you know of others.

Comments

[El Professore Technico]

While not strictly speaking based on a phone phreak theme, the book "The Shockwave Rider," by John Brunner has many proto-phreak, telecommunication, and pre-cyberpunk themes running throughout it.

From: http://www.skypoint.com/members/gimonca/brunner.html

"The book by which John Brunner is best remembered is "The Shockwave Rider", published in 1975. It's often called the first cyberpunk novel, and deservedly so. An Internet-like continental data network is a vital element in the book, and important plot events take place on it. The setting is another near-future world where the stresses of technological change are taking their toll.. The mind/body question, identity and information control are all central themes--themes that would later be taken up by William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, Rudy Rucker, and other writers of the eighties and nineties.

"Nickie Haflinger, the protagonist, could be called a proto-hacker: an escapee from a U.S. government sponsored human optimization project, manages to move from identity to identity by accessing government databases through telephone keypads. In "Shockwave Rider", the phones are veephones or videophones--you could almost replace them with videoconferencing PCs without harming the story. While telephone "phreaking" had been known in Britain since the early sixties, Brunner shows stunning insight into the potential for one clever person to manipulate computer networks for their own purposes. "He deduced from first principles that there must be a way of allowing authorized persons to drop an old identity and assume a new one, no questions asked. The nation was tightly webbed in a net of interlocking data-channels...confidential information had been rendered accessible to total strangers capable of adding two plus two. (The machines that make it more difficult to cheat on income tax can also ensure that blood of the right group is in the ambulance which picks you up from a car crash. Well?)" The netted world of "Shockwave Rider" is very much our own world of government and business databases--Brunner wasn't predicting, as much as he was warning us about the present."

I just recently re-read it, and it's quite pertinent to your posting and also a very entertaining read for a phormer phreak, hacker type, and SF fan, such as I am.

[Excerpt--goes on for six additional paragraphs. Brunner also wrote "Stand on Zanzibar" which was also quite good, depending on one's tastes in the SF genre. Oddly, Brunner died from suffering a massive stroke while attending the 53rd World Science Fiction Convention (Intersection) on Friday, 25 August, 1995. Must have been the excessive adulation from the fanboys...Heh?!]