The Birth of Pawn

Paul jumped onto IRC. Paul knew exactly what Rafa was talking about. Rafa was obviously a hacker, too. In his haste to trail BLACK, Paul had charged right into a whole freaking nest of hackers, and obviously irritated one of them. BLACK did something to the Linux machine, and so breaking into that system was like disassembling a big puzzle too. Paul closed his eyes, mentally revisited the xxd man page, opened his eyes and, again, sat amazed as his fingers fired off another xxd command this one designed to encode his own message into hex. He retyped the xxd command and whacked RETURN and became Pawn from Paul. He was trying hard to crack through the network dump that looked hectic at first glance, but he mentally translated it to something much more readable. He knew that lower-case ASCII numbers had higher values than uppercase numbers. This meant there was a good chance that the first character was lower-case.