First published to wide acclaim as The Incursion in 1987, Dirk Hanson’s The Seventh Level is a sophisticated technology thriller set in the heady early days of the online world. A hacker has attacked SEEK, the country’s largest computer network, at its highest security level—the seventh level—jeopardizing everything from international finance to nuclear missile launch codes.
The culprit has left behind a cryptic message threatening to destroy all the data in the ultra secret seventh level. The chief suspect: a young solid-state physicist named Peter Cassidy, recently resigned from the company that designed SEEK to devote his life to salmon fishing and anti-establishment cynicism.
The only people with the remotest chance of breaking into SEEK are members of an exclusive technical elite that shaped the birth of the Internet—most of them friends of Peter Cassidy’s. His wild chase through the Pacific Northwest and the high-tech world of characters like Captain Crash, Hardware Hal, and Klaatu is not a solo flight. He takes with him the pregnant wife of his best friend while tracking an unknown genius and running from the police, federal law enforcement, and corporate security agents.
To prove his innocence, Cassidy must elude federal authorities and penetrate the high-tech world of the computer elite before the real culprit can make another, even more damaging incursion into the SEEK system, turning the dream of a new technology into a nightmare of global terror. The Seventh Level deals with the implications of modern technology, but it is also a human story.