Hackers (short stories)

Hackers (ISBN 0441003753) is a collection of short stories edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois. It contains stories by noted science fiction and cyberpunk writers of the late 1980s and early 1990s about hackers.

"The Pardoner's Tale"

This story was written by Robert Silverberg and was first published in Playboy in 1987. In the future, an alien species has colonized the Earth and used the humans' own information infrastructure to control them through their in-body implants. Hackers have become valuable because they can exploit the system. Some hackers have become known as pardoners because they can arrange for people to escape the aliens' sentences in exchange for profit. The story focuses on one of the best pardoners. He is bested in a hacking duel only to find out that his opponent is an android. The pardoner faces a mistake he made in his past and finds a way to escape by hacking the alien mainframe with the help of a woman he had swindled.

Related Topics:
Robert Silverberg - Playboy - 1987

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