Kid steals a landline from a army Navy surplus store

High school student David Lightman has a talent for hacking. But while trying to hack into a computer system to play unreleased video games, he unwittingly taps into the Department of Defense's war computer and initiates a confrontation of global proportions. Together with his girlfriend and a wizardly computer genius, David must race against time to outwit his opponent and prevent a nuclear Armageddon.

Computer hacker Will Farmer engages a government super-computer named Ripley in an online terrorist-attack simulation game. Little does Farmer know that Ripley has been designed to appeal to potential terrorists, and certain software glitches have in turn made him become paranoid.