The Infinity Window

No, this story aint a fantasy. The title's a metaphor. You ever read the Blue Nowhere? Its a book about hacking and hackers, and this story is an attempted sequel. The storyline goes(for the Blue Nowhere, to get you all hooked)

When a sadistic hacker, Code-named Phate, sets his sights on Silicon Valley, he's in complete control. At the touch of a button, he can steal people's ID, presonal info, and even their lives. When a girl gets stabbed by Phate, The Computer Crimes Unit becomes involved.
Desperate, the CCU free former hacker Wyatt Gillette to aid in the investigation. Gillette feverishly attempts to track the online killer down to its source. Then, the killer delivers a huge blow, killing the CCU's leader.
An old-school street cop, Frank Bishop, takes over, and with Wyatt Gillette, they must utilize every ounce of cunning and skill they can bring to the table.

The Infinity Window preview goes as follows:

A year after the episode of Phate, Wyatt Gillette is back in jail, waiting out the last year of his sentence. Waiting for a normal life. He wants to live it out with his wife, and his newborn son.
Just like everyone else.
That dream is far from reality, however.
A determined hacker gang, dubbing themselves the Purifiers, are set on a religeous mission to find, and kill, as many people as possible. They are incredibly skilled at hacking, in the Machine World. They aren't like Phate, in the way of close-up killing.
Gillette is again offered a position in the CCU, and he gladly accepts. When he proves unsuccessful, he summons up his old crowd hacker gang, the legendary Knights of Access, known by all in the world of hacking.
Time is working against them...
Because every hour, another "accident" happens. Coincidence? Maybe not. A person in Medical Care dies of an overdose, A fire sets off with the sprinklers disabled. Such and such.
This story is about the war of two skilled hacker gangs, one bad, one good. A classic brawler, some might say. Only this time, the consequences are more than a crashed hard drive, more than a screwed up CD-drive.
It's about life and death.

So, whaddya think?

The idea looks pretty good. I dunno how you'd write it though, like a police investigation?

And would you also be writing the hacker's battles, or would they just be going on?

Yep. That's exactly how The Blue Nowhere went. Police investigation.
About the hacker battles:
I don't really know what you exactly mean, though. Of course, I'm writing them, and what exactly happens. I'll start this story next week. I hope.

Chapter One---

The sound of pounding rang through the halls of San Ho county prison. To an outsider, it might have sounded like a hammer tapping on a plastic tarp. The inmates there, however, had gotten used to it. They knew exactly what it was. The sound of a certain inmate, pounding code into his Toshiba laptop.
His name was Wyatt Gillette.
Gillette was imprisoned for hacking, three years ago. But at the end of the second year, he was freed, a temporary parole. His assignment: To track down a former friend and hacker gang founder, who referred to himself as Phate.
In the Machine world, it's all in the spelling. That was what he had told Frank Bishop. And it was the reason how they had found Shawn. In the machine world, hackers spelled "f"-spelled things with a "p-h" instead. Which was the case with Phate.
Phate in question, was currently dead. Gillette hadn't visited the funeral. Come to think of it, he doubted if anyone would.
All he wanted to do now was to wait out the last year of his sentence. Have a family. Be like Frank Bishop, the natrual family man. Until then, he was writing programs on the Toshiba. A lot didn't take long. Maybe only a few days. The inmates often grumbled at him, for he was a lound typist, who stayed up writing script late into the night.
He was strictly forbidden to go online, of course. Well, he could've easily built his own Internet Modem card out of a Walkman, but he didn't. Hell, a year ago he built a computer from scratch, the materials bartered for. Bishop made him swear not to. The honor system, he called it. Well, the oath had stuck so far. Probably the fact that his wife had visited him as well.

NOTE-I made a chronological error. WHen I said that he had to wait out the last year, I meant last two weeks.

He was planning to get a job at the CCU, when his sentence was done. Although there was the issue that he had a criminal record, Bishop listened, and said that he would back Gillette up. Easy as that.
His prison life had been a heck of a lot more enjoyable after he got the laptop, a side deal that Andy Anderson had offered. He had written lots of kludges, like search engines for users, references, or information. Those took about 15 minutes. Another program, which he named Sifter, looked for anomalies in the command script for corrupted data, and possibly viruses. It was two days before he finished keying up the source code for Sifter. Another program. And right now, he was currently building a circuit board.
Last year, he had "invented" a circuit board, made out of scratch, which was various components of radios, walkmans, and a calculator. The board's purpose was for wireless internet. It used a transistor to detect the cell number you were currently in, and transferred it to an adapter(purloined off of a walkman). The adapter dialed you up to the internet, without having to use your cell phone. When you moved to a different cell, the transistor would automatically compensate.
This one was supposed to let you use your TV, in place of monitors. Hell, he had traded two jars of apricot preserves and a tin of coffee(all from Bishop) to get a pocket-held TV.
He takes things apart...
That was what his mother had said to his childhood friends. Wyatt Gillette had a raging curiousity, which disallowed him to not see how everything worked. And in order to do that, things had to be taken apart. Everything from calculators to VCR players had been dismantled , and rebuilt. And they had worked just fine afterwards.
Of course, this was helpful in many ways.
He had traded a candy bar for a screwdriver, courtesy of Glenn Alfredson(who was imprisoned for grand theft auto).
The screwdriver poked at the casing on the back.
Gotta be careful...

A clang sounded in the hallway. Oh, damn. If they searched his cell, they would end up with the circuit board. Which they would take away, and hopefully nothing worse.
He sprang up, grabbed the circuit board, and stuffed it into a spare t-shirt that Tony Mott, from CCU, and bought for him a month ago. His cell had been "artfully" messed around, so that it looked like any other cell in the San Ho Men's Correctional Facility. Sloppy, and unkempt.
Please, please, please don't come to this cell. Please...
But the guard did, and Gillette, out of fear more than protocol, sprang to attention.
The guard surveyed his cell with a bored indifference. Finally the sunglasses faced Wyatt. "Visitor, Gillette."
Thank you, god. The board would survive another day. And other than that, he had a visitor. His visitors at least brought him something. Two weeks ago, Ellie Papandolos, his wife, had gave him pumice to sand down his hacker's manicure. Hacker's manicure was more of an oxymoron than anything, because his fingers were blunt, very muscular, and tipped with think yellow callus at the fingertips.
The guard led him to the visitor's booth. And through the Plexigas, Gillette saw Frank Bishop, with sideburns, and a grim frown on his face. Almost immediately, Gillette sensed that something was wrong. Last year's episode with Phate had told him wonders about how to assess react to a situation.
Sure enough, Bishop rested his chin on his fingertips, and said."We have a situation, Wyatt."
"It was obvious, Frank," He replied."and knowing me, it's something about computers. Another hacker?"
"It's a hacker gang, actually. And extremely talented."
Gillette's eyes squinted, and he began to grow very interested. "What have they been doing? They killed anyone?"
"More than one, obviously"Bishop replied."Apparently, they have no motives. I checked with Linda and Tony, but it doesn't seem like Phate's motive: Milestone computer dates. We've asked the investigators to see if there's a religious connection to this...holidays, tradition, anything like that. So far, they haven't come up with anything successful yet."
"How were the victims killed?" Wyatt asked.
Bishop swallowed, suddenly distracted."They were beheaded."
Both men grimaced.

"Definitely religeous crap." Gillette said, and shook his head.
"You think so?"
"It sure sounds like some sacriligeous group."
Bishop tucked his shirt in. "Well, Linda and Tony 've checked out the victim's computers, but they've found encrypted gibberish, that wasn't there before-"
"Wait, wait," Gillette said. "What do you mean, by 'not there before' ?"
"Do you remember last year, you hacked together a kludge, named 'Detective'?"
Gillette remembered. He had written a very hasty program, a "kludge", which looked for things that weren't part of someone's everyday machine. It had found gibberish, remnants of a working program.
Bishop continued:"Linda found the old floppy disk, and used it. She found the encrypted files, which were apparently loaded on the vic's computer, sometime before the actual killings. She ran the restoration programs, and dragged up some log files."
When you were on a computer, it automatically tracks down everything you're doing on the computer. With intact log files, a hacker can find out passcodes, and other important things. People had to "wipe" the free space on their computers, and rewrite their own log files, to prevent this from happening.
Gillette asked the obvious question."What useful stuff did she find?"
"Nothing useful, yet...although we found out that the victim's computer was broken into at approximately 8:52 AM Mountain time. Forensics ran the actual crime scene, and the victim was killed at almost exactly twenty-four hours later."
"About the victim...did he hack, or did illicit things, anything like that?"
"Nope."
So the killers were breaking rule number one: Leave the civilians alone.
When that symptom was obvious, it most likely meant that the perpetrators had not a clue which 'world' was real, the Machine world, or the Real world. Add that to the murderous nature of the perps, plus their hacking skill, and one had a dangerous combination.

Ummm. Jeffrey Deaver IS still alive. It's copyright infringement to write what you are writing without written consent from the author. And if he wants a sequel, let HIM write one.

/hack

well, i like it. it's really good. J.K Rowling is still alive and we all know she's still writing her sequels, but there are ppl who are writing their own sequel and there's nothing wrong with that. i really like it dark, i thought at first i wouldn't and i wouldn't understand it, but i do and i really enjoyed what you've written so far.