I first met Micah back in 1995, if memory serves me correctly. At first Micah was known to me only by the sinister sounding alias "iMMORTAL BEiNG". He was the SysOp of several local underground bulletin board systems including "Downward Spiral, Inc." and the one that I remember the best, "The Forbidden Destiny." The Forbidden Destiny was one of those "2leet4u" warez boards with new user voting and a new user application longer than your arm that read more like an exam than a registration form. It had a lot of great stuff, tons of cracks and warez mostly, but looking back, my favorite part about it was that it ran PCBoard but was modded to the extreme. There was barely a facet of the system that hadn't been replaced with a PPE or some other mod, and although most of the modifications weren't Micah's own work he certainly must have went through a hell of a lot of trouble setting them up and making them all gel together. I had been around a bit by that time but hadn't quite blossomed into becoming "elite" yet, though I somehow managed to know just enough to get validated and gain access to the system. Probably a discussion around setting me up some leech time or getting me some specific files carried over from a SysOp chat, Micah and I ended up talking on the phone. It's not easy to remember because this was the first of many such phone calls and the start of a great friendship.
The local BBS scene had all but died by the end of that year giving way to the popularity of massive online services such as AOL, CompuServe, Prodigy, and the still rather fledgling dial-up Internet service provider industry, but throughout 1996 Micah and I had linked up both online and offline on several fronts. I had done a lot of ANSI and ASCII art for his Internet "courier" group/service, I convinced him to set a BBS back up, we setup an echomail network between our two BBSes, and we kept up our semi-regular phone conversations. I clearly remember how happy he was when he got his first IT job, and I remember Chris, the SysOp of "The Virtual Screwdriver" BBS, giving Micah a job at his startup ISP Expanding Technologies, and us discussing the now legendary Kracked.com before it was even fully conceived.
It was probably around this time, coinciding with Micah buying a new car, that we started hanging out on a regular basis. He made a habit of driving out to my parents' house in the sticks and picking me up, even well after I got a license and a car of my own. Sometimes we'd drive around aimlessly, sharing our overlapping tastes in music, and chatting. Often we'd end up at his office, hanging out after he got off of work; hell, I remember that the first time I played Quake was at the XTC/XTN offices with him one night on their LAN. In 1997 Chris started up a little all ages music venue called "The Office" nearby and Micah would usually work the door. I saw shows there a lot, sometimes multiple times a week, and frequently hung out with Micah before and after helping him clean up or just keeping him company. We continued that tradition of hanging out every so often up until Chris's second ISP, Wireco, was dissolved in 2001. We'd usually grab some (typically Chinese) food and shoot the shit about games, BBSing, music, the scene, Linux, and life in general. I don't know if a single one of these little get-togethers went by without us hatching some bizarre scheme that Micah somehow usually managed to half-way pull off before realizing how crazy it was. I also can't help but mention how he always had a way of cracking a hysterically inappropriate joke out of no where. It was always a damn good time when we hung out and I want to simultaneously laugh out loud and break down sobbing when I look back on these memories.
While few of my "offline" friends knew him other than from working the door at The Office, nor did I know many of his friends as more than simple acquaintances, my online friends certainly all knew him (mostly by the handle he eventually settled on, simply "m1cah".) Micah built the aforementioned Kracked.com, primarily used as a web host, which quickly grew from his hobbyist Linux sandbox to an extremely active server. Being hosted at the ISP he worked at, Kracked.com had tremendous resources available to it in the form of static IPs and bandwidth which were uncommon back then for a individual to have. Micah hosted Demonic's website and a few other sites of mine, but beyond that it would be impossible for me to nail down every contribution he has made to me, my friends, and the BBS and underground scenes as a whole. To name only a very few besides hosting (often for free) a mind numbing number of scene related websites, pages, and files, Micah ran mirror sites of several popular scene archives including ACiD's famous Artpacks Archive, he created and ran "BBS Central", and he setup the awesomely popular dynamic DNS service "Detour.net" which SysOps went to in droves for persistent hostnames in the days of dial-up when the only other site doing this was the infamous Monolith Project. In the old days he was also a founding member of "(iMC) iMMORTAL COURiERS", the only HPCAV courier group (pack producing for that matter) that I've ever heard of.
If it isn't already apparent, Micah was an extremely generous person. In fact, free associating with him, that's the first word that pops into my head. He always had a "how can I help you" or "what can I do for you" attitude, and he'd bend over backwards for people, often people he didn't even know. Probably everyone reading this that knew him had a website, a shell, an email account, a Detour hostname, or at the very least used one of the websites he hosted. It wasn't just as far as Kracked.com was concerned either, he was that generous, caring, and considerate in general. These ethics were reflected in the workplace, where he built up a reputation for providing great customer service oriented tech support. Micah really seemed to enjoy being in a provider role, and it wasn't about power or control; he genuinely liked to help people out. This was always a quality I greatly admired in Micah, and in return when he needed something I always tried to help. It's funny when I think back on those local BBS scene days, as this was probably what made him run a warez board in the first place.
Some of my fondest memories were the result of introducing Micah to an e-zine called "Phone Losers of America" which humorously chronicled the life and times of a group of phone phreaks. My brother and I had been avidly reading it for awhile and I was a huge fan, and Micah instantly fell in love with it. We ended up building red boxes and spending way too many nights going around making prank calls and pretending to actually be doing something as dangerous and thrilling as chronicled by our PLA heroes. Actually, a great example of the kind of generosity that was characteristic of Micah throughout our friendship is that when he found out that PLA was having both technical and legal problems with keeping their website up, Micah put his neck on the line, offering to host it, which he ended up doing for several years. Anyway, I could recount more than my share of local BBS scene shenanigans and tons of other colorful anecdotes about the things Micah and I got up to in much more detail, such as the time he dragged me along with him to a sketchy tattoo parlor in Greeneville, TN so he could impulsively get his tongue pierced, but I know most of them are probably only really significant to me personally.
Sadly, the last time I saw Micah was in mid 2002. He was bouncing around between temp jobs and happened to get one in the city that I was working in. Even with us growing apart a little, he made the effort to arrange a few lunchtime meet-ups to hang out and shoot the shit like old times. Despite struggling to find a new job, he seemed to be very much on the upswing. He was classic Micah, cracking me up and conniving on ridiculous schemes, but he had been making a sincere effort to clean himself up. I recall feeling good about where he was after being a little worried for him at times years prior. Not long after our last lunchtime Chinese buffet raid I gave him a reference for his next job at the local university, which he landed and seemed to be enjoying from what I remember. We still spoke on occasion, though mostly via e-mail and IM, and not as often as I would have liked considering the circumstance. About a year later he moved to Florida to stay with some of his family, and our interactions became even more scarce. He was probably unaware of it, but I still kept up on him, reading his blogs and whatnot. He often mentioned having a lack of friends in his posts which saddened me at the time, and even more so now, as I considered him a true friend, and I'll always regret not making that clearer to him before he passed.
Looking back, it's shocking to think that Micah was around during some of the most formative times in my young adult life, from us meeting during my awkward sophomore year of high school and being a big part of my obsession with the underground computer scene, being there during the start of my involvement with the local punk scene, being around me and my first girlfriend and the drama when that inevitably went south, being there the entire time I was going to college, to those last lunchtime hangouts which took place while I was working my first "real" job after graduating. You know, I don't think I ever realized how truly unique our friendship was. He made a real impact on my life, and I genuinely miss him. So much has changed for me in the years since I last saw him that I'm both inspired and deeply saddened to imagine what he might be up to if he were still here. Maybe one of those preposterous schemes would have finally paid off? I'd like to think so...
On a final note to Demonic alumni: we often joked around about the possibility of having a "DemoniCon" convention / get-together. If that ever actually happened, Micah would have been the first person I could have counted on being there. To me, that, and all of these fond memories, are what the "scene" was really all about. None of it would be any fun without the people you called your friends and the times you shared together.
Jack Phlash
Originally written 01/04/05, revised 08/15/22