At the end of issue 1 in the 'letters pages' section,[2] author Lewis Shiner reveals that he'd based The Hacker Files story and comic book protagonist Jack Marshall on his unpublished novel Red Weather, which he'd began developing in Summer 1978.

That story dealt with a software programmer in his late-twenties named "Jack Marshall", who worked for a sinister Texas-based computer company.

Maverick company president Donny Travis worked alongside Marshall to invent the Digitronix Desktop PC.

Jack uncovers a traitor in Cheyenne Mountain who dies while trying to escape, he later stops General Wade Eiling from accidentally launching a nuclear strike on Russia and prevents World War III.

Catherine Cobert of Justice League International calls in the assistance of Green Lantern Hal Jordan on behalf of Sue Denim and Oracle, but Jack Marshall gets there first.

Yoshio introduces Jack to Yan Qing a Chinese exile and a survivor of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, her fiance Yi who worked at a Digitronix assembly plant in China, had discovered an undocumented feature in the machine he was working on, it automatically recorded all spoken conversation in its local environment and stored it in a hidden partition on the machine's optical hard drive.

[6] Yoshio discovers a massive mobilization of Digitronix personnel and hardware being sent to a secret facility at Tyuratam in Kazakhstan, parallel processors, Prolog language modules, and experimental fiber optic buses.

They figure out that Digitronix is building a working globally networked artificial intelligence which they intend to use to process a few million gigabytes of stolen government and industrial secrets.

[1] Jack uses a Digitronix videophone to contact Justice League Europe headquarters in London, and offers them a cure for the Pentagon virus.

Wally West scouts the installation at superspeed and runs into a door knocking himself out, he is captured by Digitronix security but escapes them when he wakes up.

Jack uses the virtual reality interface to hack the AI which looks like Sutcliffe, he confronts it inside a game of Code of the West.

It boasted 100 megabytes of ram, an HDTV monitor and optical disk storage, possibly based on the NeXTcube's magneto-optical drive.