Banking and hacking collide in Chicago. Told in present
tense, this is the story of a young man who takes risks on
the way up the corporate ladder and then finds something
worse than he could have expected. Huxley's friend tells an
executive that AlphaBanc's activities are beyond the pale
and takes a tumble from a high window. Accessing
comprehensive records on clients, from medical to social
security, drivers, financial, marital, criminal, phone call
listings, video clips, facial recognition software, had
seemed like fun. Now Huxley's scared....
In GLASS HOUSE 51 Clayborne wears a two hundred dollar tie
to a teleconference, while snug in a hideaway a computer
hacker named Norman Dunne is meeting women on line - women
who end up dead. His nickname is the Gnome. Meanwhile other
hackers have wormed their way into the air traffic control
system at O'Hare airport. The Gnome knows who they are,
and pulls a sick stunt to deter them from such activity.
Christin is a girl in Alphabanc who considers banking jocks
beneath her notice, especially since she overheard that
there was a pot of a thousand dollars for the first guy who
could get her in bed. She decides to sign up for a hot
online dating site.
Since this is slightly in the future, I was surprised that
a cellphone is still in danger by being dropped in the
bath: waterproof ones already exist. People pop Deludamil
tranquilisers and let computers run their lives, their jobs
coming down to making data entries. A large number of
characters are thrown at us in the first few chapters, and
it's hard to keep switching and remembering what job and
dilemma went with which person. The Data Protection laws
restrict holding so much information on people and the
implication is that the banks are ignoring them. The data
in the story is physically stored on supercomputers in a
underground data facility in Wisconsin, which generate so
much heat that chimneys have to vent the steam. The
history of hacking and routes it has taken are described,
and the Gnome as a former AlphaBanc employee can hack the
bank anytime, while malicious hackers plan anarchy. RFID
tags in everything are scanned and linked to everyone, from
passports to t-shirt purchases by cards, and every phone
call and mail is subject to state eavesdropping; all as
predicted by SF writers for fifty years.
If you don't like being spied upon, use cash and write
letters, is my advice. GLASS HOUSE 51 by John Hampel is
not easily readable to non-SF fans and those not into
information technology overload may switch off partway, but
for anyone interested it's an absorbing and worrying read.
Glass House 51 is the insanely amazing adventure—or
misadventure—of a lifetime, of one Richard Clayborne, a
hard-charging young marketing maverick at gigantic
AlphaBanc's San Francisco branch.
Hyper-ambitious Richard has been offered an intriguing
assignment: Get online via NEXSX and make e-time with the
lovely, brilliant (and doomed) Chicagoan Christin Darrow.
All to set a trap for the reclusive—and very deadly—
computer genius, Norman Dunne, aka the Gnome.
Why?
Three lovely young women dead in the streets of Chicago.
And the Gnome, a former AlphaBanc employee, is the main
suspect. But there just might be another AlphaBanc agenda
in the works. . . .
Little does clueless Richard know what is in store: a
tangled, twisted—and very treacherous—journey through the
AlphaBanc underground, but by the time he realizes it, he's
in too deep to get out.
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