Editing True Names (section)

==Plot summary==
The story follows the progress of a group of computer [[hacker (programmer subculture)|hacker]]s (called "warlocks") who are [[early adopter (marketing)|early adopters]] of a new full-immersion [[virtual reality]] technology, called the "Other Plane". Warlocks penetrate computers around the world for personal profit or curiosity. They must keep their true identities ("True Names") secret even from each other and from the "Great Enemy", the [[United States government]], as those who know a warlock's True Name can force him to work on their behalf, or cause a "True Death" by killing the warlock in real life.

The protagonist is a warlock known as "Mr. Slippery" in the Other Plane. The government learns Mr. Slippery's True Name—Roger Pollack, a holonovelist in [[Arcata, California]]—and forces him to investigate the Mailman, a mysterious new warlock which the government suspects of conducting a large-scale subversion of databases and networks. The Mailman has been recruiting others, such as the warlock DON.MAC, by promising great power in the real world, and claims to be responsible for a recent revolution in Venezuela. Because he communicates only through text, and reacts to events only after a significant delay, Mr. Slippery and fellow warlock Erythrina begin to suspect that the Mailman may be an extraterrestrial invader, subverting global databases to conquer the Earth while causing the True Deaths of the warlocks he recruits.

Mr. Slippery and Erythrina receive permission from the government to use the old [[ARPANET]] to access massive amounts of computational power around the world as they search for the Mailman. As they become the most powerful warlocks in history they realize that DON.MAC is a sophisticated "[[artificial intelligence|personality simulator]]" working for the Mailman. It violently defends itself, and both sides use network connections to military weaponry to attack in the real world. Erythrina is forced to reveal her True Name to Mr. Slippery as the battles, real and virtual, cause global chaos. They succeed in destroying the many copies of the Mailman's AI, and although tempted to keep their power over the world realize that they do not wish to be tyrants.

Ten weeks after the war and resulting worldwide [[economic depression]] from the disruptions in computer systems, Mr. Slippery returns to the Coven and learns that the Mailman may have survived. Fearing that Erythrina succumbed to temptation for power, Pollack visits her—Debbie Charteris of [[Providence, Rhode Island]]—in person. The elderly Charteris, an early military computer programmer, reveals that the Mailman was not an extraterrestrial, but a [[National Security Agency]] AI research project to protect government systems. Mistakenly left running, it slowly grew in power and sophistication, and used non-real-time communication to disguise its inability to fully emulate the human mind. As Charteris succumbs to senility she transfers more of her personality to the defeated Mailman's [[kernel (operating system)|kernel]], and tells Pollack that "when this body dies, I will still be, and you can still talk to me".