Sam is just your every day high schooler. Well, in the sense that he's young and goes to school. However, he's smarter than he looks. On an average morning, he decides to hack into the country's most protected communications firm, Telecomerica, just to see if he could. He gets through the system without being detected and assumes that no one will be watching...until someone is. Before he's caught, he unleashes a virus that crashes their system just after ordering his friend Fargas and himself neuro-headsets.
A few days later, he and Fargas attend a hackers convention. Sam believes he is attending H@ck-Con, when really the big boys are just trying to weed out the fakes from the real deal. When Sam proves himself, two masked people come up to him and say that that real Con is online. If he wants to join, he'll have to hack into one of the most guarded networks in the world: The White House. At 9 PM, Sam sets to work on creating a tunnel inside the building's network. Only minutes later, he's in. Just as he's about to approach the room where the others are located, his doorbell rings and his flown to a juvenile detention center called Recton. Did they find out that it was Sam who pulled off the hack into Telecomerica? Were they aware that he had just hacked into the White House's network? What will happen to him now that he's been caught?
I'm hardly scratching the surface of this book, but giving anything more away would honestly take away from it. This was an outstanding book. Completely terrifying, but incredible. There were so many moments where I was not only blown away by this guy's intelligence, but of the surprises lurking around every corner. I certainly did not see over half of this book coming. It was so smart. I was really happy that I had decided to pick this up.
As I said, this book also completely terrified me. While I can hang with Kubrick, Huxley, Vonnegut and Orwell like anybody else, the technological advances of today and within the pages of this book somehow didn't seem too different. This was something that I could see happening and that's not cool. It made me wonder if someone was watching me and quietly sifting through the contents of my phone and laptop. I feel like this sort of technology is imminent and that's so incredibly scary. But I guess that's the nature of certain pieces of Sci-Fi; they're meant to make us worry.
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