CONFIRM OUTSIDE

Britain, 1984. A wrong page number is all it takes.

Seventeen-year-old Daniel Mercer spends his evenings exploring Prestel and Micronet through a ZX Spectrum 48K and a VTX 5000 modem, tying up the family telephone line one slow connection at a time.

Then a mistyped number opens a page he was never meant to see.

At first, it contains nothing more than codes, times and references to a military exercise called ABELARD. But when Daniel finds two versions of the same message - one clearly marked as exercise traffic, the other not - curiosity becomes something far more dangerous.

With only a home computer, cassette tapes, handwritten notes and the help of the sharp-minded Sarah Whitcombe, Daniel begins following a trail that reaches far beyond his bedroom.

Set in the Britain of dial-up networks, teletext and early home computing, Confirm Outside is a tightly plotted technological conspiracy thriller in which the ZX Spectrum is not a nostalgic prop, but the machine through which an ordinary teenager sees something powerful people have missed.

For readers who remember the ZX Spectrum, cassette loading, telephone modems and the first strange excitement of going online.