Free Shadow Man by Cody McFadyen Page A

of what your friend did for a living.”
    I give him a good once-over. He returns my gaze without flinching. He’s a good-looking kid, probably twenty-four or twenty-five. Dark hair, calm eyes. “Which was what? You said I wasn’t accurate. So explain it to us.”
    He moves up a few seats nearer to us; invited into the inner circle, he leaps at the opportunity. Everyone wants to belong. “It’s kind of a long explanation.”
    “We have the time. Go ahead.”
    He nods, a gleam coming to his eye that I recognize as excitement. Computers are his thing, what he is passionate about. “To understand it, you have to understand that pornography on the Internet is an entirely different subculture from pornography in the ‘real world.’ ” He’s settling back, relaxing, getting ready to give a lecture on a subject he knows everything about. It’s his moment in the spotlight, and I’m happy to let him have it. It gives me time to settle my thoughts and my stomach. And something to think about besides little Bonnie, staring at her dead mother’s face for three days.
    “Go on.”
    “Starting in around 1978, you had something called BBSs—Bulletin Board Systems. Actually the full name was Computerized Bulletin Board Systems. These were the first nongovernment, public-accessible networks. If you had a modem and a computer, you could post up mes- S H A D O W M A N 55
    sages, do file sharing, and so on. Of course, back then, almost all the users were scientists or supernerds. But the reason this is relevant is that BBSs became a place to post up porn pics. You could share them, trade them, whatever. And at this point, we’re not just talking Wild West, we are talking undiscovered country. No oversight, nada. Something important to porn users because—”
    James chimes in: “It was free, and it was private.”
    Leo grins and bobs his head. “Exactly! You didn’t have to sneak in the back of some porno shop and brown-bag it. You could lock your bedroom door and download your porno pics without fear of discovery. It was HUGE. So, BBSs were the only public game in town, and they were everywhere, and porn was already everywhere on them.
    “BBSs pretty much drop away as the Internet evolves and Web sites start coming out, and browsers, and dot-com names, and all that stuff. BBSs were always basically for posting, with the viewing being done after download. Now you have Web sites, where you can see it as fast as you connect to it. So what happens with porn?” He smiles. “What actually happened is twofold: You had some smart businessmen—I’m talking guys who already had money—who started to develop adult Web sites on the Net. Some were from the audiotext industry—”
    “Which is what?” I interrupt.
    “Sorry. Phone sex. These guys who were already raking in the dough on phone sex saw the Web and realized its potential for porn. Private, pay-per-view, on-demand whack-off material for the everyday guy. They poured a bunch of money into buying existing pornography. Pics scanned in by the hundreds of thousands and posted up on Web sites. In order to view them, you had to whip out your credit card. And that is where things changed in porn.”
    Callie frowns. “What do you mean, changed?”
    “I’m getting to that. See, up to that point, porn was pretty much a
    ‘hands on’ kind of thing. If you were selling videos, for example, you were up to your neck in the industry. In other words, you’d been on movie sets, seen sex going on in front of you, knew the people, maybe even been in front of the camera yourself. It’s always been a very tight, small group. But with Web sites, these early guys, they were a whole new breed. There was a layer between them and the actual creation of the stuff. They had money, and they paid the pornographers for their pics. 56
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    They put them up on the Web and charged to view them. You see the difference? These guys weren’t pornographers, not in the classical