Breaking and Entering Page 2

  On either side of the courtyard, east and west, were wide five-story brick dormitories, each fronted by three doors. A minute after sitting down, out of the corner of her eye Alien thought she saw darting movement near an open window on the top story of the east dorm. It was too dark to tell, however, and anyway, a narrow ledge running outside the fifth-floor windows blocked a clear view from below. That’s why it startled her when two black-clad figures suddenly stepped out of the darkness in front of her.

  They were a man and a woman. The guy was a skinny five six with Asian features and silver-dyed spiked hair. Alien saw a long radio antenna poking out of his back pocket. His companion was an African American woman at least four inches taller and one hundred pounds heavier. She had on neon-green safety goggles, presumably decorative, and wore her long hair back in thick braids. Despite their physical differences, both were dressed in dark pants and the same black T-shirt: JACK FLOREY’S OLD NO. 5, it said, in a design echoing a Jack Daniel’s bottle label. QUALITY MASSACHUSETTS ROOF & TUNNEL HACKERS.

  “Hi,” Alien said. “Excuse me. Are you—? Do you—?”

  The woman held her hand up to silence Alien, then, with a wave, bade her follow them in single file: Silver Hair, Safety Goggles, Alien.

  A step behind her impromptu guides, Alien crossed the courtyard and entered the sharp-cornered triangular Building 66. They walked down stairs, turned twice in a basement, and reached a narrow passage leading several hundred feet underground out of the building and across campus. Exiting at the other end, Alien followed her hosts up a new set of stairs to the main floor of what she recognized as Building 54, MIT’s tallest structure.

  On the first floor, still without a word, Silver Hair opened a classroom door and Safety Goggles all but pushed Alien inside.

  The room was your classic large lecture hall: three hundred wooden seats divided into three downward-sloping sections. Squinting a bit under the sudden illumination of fluorescent lights, Alien saw almost half the seats were already occupied by other curious, clueless freshmen. Meanwhile, twenty older students—twelve guys, eight women, all wearing the same black T-shirts—patrolled the aisles, communicating urgently about Important and Secret matters. Some even had two-way radios to talk to Silver Hair, Safety Goggles, and others outside the room. Obviously they were not to be interrupted by impertinent questions from the likes of her.

  Taking a seat in the last occupied row, Alien feigned unconcern and studied a cute redheaded guy with a dimpled chin in front of her. Her very sweet high school boyfriend, Micah, was also an incoming in the Boston area, but it was time to start fresh, she felt, so she had broken things off. Convenient, because now, after what seemed an eternity, the redhead turned and noticed her smoothing her newly colored hair.

  “What did I miss?” she asked him.

  “I can’t tell you,” he said. “Punishment for being late.”

  “I’m not late,” Alien said. “I was just doing something else more interesting.”

  “Really?” His eyebrow rose at the boast. But he smiled and said, “Invite me next time.”

  “What’s your name?” asked Alien.

  “Cal,” he said. On the back of his own bright orange invitation, he scribbled his new username—CDaniels—so that she could email him.

  “Mine’s Alien,” she told him, satisfied that he looked impressed.

  The older students must have decided that Alien would be the last of their guests this evening, for they finally quieted their radios, and a big bearded guy strode to the front of the room, boosted himself atop the wide wooden lecturer’s desk, and stood to speak, casting shadows behind him on sliding blackboards that held the chalky remnants of four decades of erased physics equations.

  “Greetings,” he boomed. “I’m Jack. By a remarkable coincidence, all my colleagues here tonight”—he gestured to the other organizers in black—“are also named Jack. We are here to help you understand your new home and experience certain sights that you might otherwise miss.

  “This tour is not officially sanctioned by MIT. In fact”—he grinned—“you could say it doesn’t exist. If participating in something that doesn’t exist makes you uncomfortable, please feel free to leave.” He paused, looking up and down the room, as did Alien. There were murmurs, and a few of the freshmen shifted uneasily in their seats, but none took him up on the offer. And how could they? Alien thought. They were special now—part of something secret. They had to see what happened next.

  “All right, then.” Jack cleared his throat. “Just because this tour doesn’t exist doesn’t mean it doesn’t have rules. Like this one.” He raised his hand. People murmured. Then they stared. Then, after maybe half a minute had passed, they shut up.

  “Exactly,” Jack said. “A hand up means total silence. We are out tonight to see—not to be seen. And not being seen begins with not being heard.”

  The tutorial continued for another half hour. Walk single file. Follow the footsteps of the person in front of you. If you see an obstacle en route, don’t speak, but point it out clearly to the person behind you. Don’t step on glass ceilings—they break. Don’t touch hot steam pipes—they burn. Crouch below the walls of any roof so you stay unseen. Don’t take anything. Don’t drop anything. And where they were going tonight, the freshmen should never go back to alone.

  “Above all, exercise common sense,” Jack said. “We’d rather have you safe and sound on the ground, staring up, saying, ‘Oh shit, I should have gone on the roof,’ than have you up on a roof, staring down, saying, ‘Oh shit, I should have stayed on the ground.’”

  The room responded with nervous laughter. Good luck with that, Alien thought. No freshman would want to be the one to chicken out and miss the adventure.

  “One more thing,” Jack wrapped up. “We are not alone tonight. The men in blue suits are looking for us.” Everyone understood that he meant the CPs, or campus police. “They do not want to arrest you. They want you not to exist. Satisfy that desire. If you hear someone coming, change floors. If you can’t change floors, walk in the opposite direction. If you can’t walk in the opposite direction, don’t talk to them. If you have to talk to them, be friendly and polite. Have an excuse ready, like you’re lost, or a question to ask, like ‘Where’s the bathroom?’”

  Jack’s eyes twinkled. “If we can be invisible, you should be able to be invisible,” he concluded, acknowledging his stature and the not exactly discreet appearance of many of his colleagues. “It’s amazing what you can get away with if you don’t look like you’re getting away with anything.”

  The Jacks divided the room into three groups of forty, each accompanied by seven guides. Each guide had his or her own clearly defined and obviously well-rehearsed role: Head Jack to lead the group; Scout Jack to determine their route and look out for cops; Radio Jack to communicate with other groups; Tail Jack to count freshmen and make sure no one got lost; Supply Jack to carry water, snacks, and a first aid kit; and two Utility Jacks roving the line to monitor everyone and offer help or answer questions as necessary.

  Silver Hair, it turned out, was the Radio Jack in Alien’s group. Safety Goggles was the Tail Jack. Alien felt lucky when it turned out that her Head Jack was the same bearded giant who had addressed the entire lecture hall. And luckier still when the freshman placed directly in front of her in the middle of the pack was Cal, her new crush.

  “Stay close,” he whispered, winking.

  Alien put a silencing finger to her lips and winked back.

  The freshmen turned over any backpacks or bags to a separate Jack, who would deliver them to their final location. Then they were off.

  Wide-eyed and serious, looking out for blue uniforms, Alien, Cal, and their group tiptoed out of the lecture hall and back down the stairs to the Building 54 basement, where a new, longer tunnel delivered them to the basement of another building. As they climbed stairs, Alien realized that they were back at and then above the Infinite Corridor. More halls and more stairs passed in an exciting b
lur. Two floors up, one floor down seemed the general pattern, with much crisscrossing along the way.

  At last they reached a top floor. They turned a corner and encountered a locked door. Their Scout Jack—pale and efficient, with a long nose and wispy mustache—took a small, flexible plastic card from his pocket and slid it between the door and frame until the card was wedged securely behind the latch. He jerked quickly, the latch gave, and the lock opened. Triumphant, he led them into a narrow lounge intended for custodial employees.

  At one end of the lounge Alien saw a metal staircase leading straight to the roof, which Scout Jack started climbing. Head Jack stopped short, however. He raised his hand emphatically, demanding and receiving complete quiet. Then, with his other hand, he pointed to the opposite side of the room, where a young man—janitor? student? both?—sat in a cushy chair, calculator in his lap, pencil and notebook in hand, hunched over a thousand-page biology textbook.

  Was that it? Alien held her breath. Were they busted? One shout and they’d be surrounded by CPs. And it seemed unlikely that they could all claim to be looking for the bathroom.

  But no shout came. For the biology enthusiast was so deeply immersed in his studies that he never lifted his head from the textbook even as forty-seven sets of eyes watched him scribble out cell diagrams. After a lengthy pause, and some fervent but silent hand signals between Jacks, the entire tour group marched on, up the stairs and out onto the roof.

  “Duck.” The whispered command went down the line, and the tour proceeded at a crouch. Ahead of her Alien saw the person in front of Cal point out a pipe sticking out of the ground, waiting to trip someone. Cal in turn pointed it out to Alien, and she pointed it out to the freshman behind her. Each stepped over it in turn.

  A minute later they reached one of four squat pyramids overlooking Killian Court, the main campus’s central courtyard. Here Head Jack had taken Scout Jack aside and was telling him off about not having spotted the biology student. Radio Jack, meanwhile, was warning the other tours via a central relay. While this took place, one of the Utility Jacks stepped forward to regale them. He was round-faced and genial, any pedantry undercut by a slight lisp and an overgrown bowl haircut he kept blowing up out of his eyes, as if to punctuate key statements.

  “Contrary to popular conception, hacking originated at MIT in the early twentieth century, long before the advent of computers,” Story Jack told them.

  “The original hacks were elaborate, extremely clever student pranks—handing out colored cards at a Harvard-Yale football game to spell MIT rather than BEAT YALE when raised by eleven hundred Harvard fans, for example, or sneaking a power supply, multi-piece wooden frame, and the outer metal parts of a Chevrolet Cavalier atop the Great Dome, so it appeared that the building was mounted by a real police cruiser, complete with flashing lights and boxes of Dunkin’ Donuts.”

  The freshmen laughed. The campus had two signature domes: the “Little” Dome, one hundred feet high and seventy-two feet across, atop Building 7, and the “Great” Dome, atop the engineering library, Building 10, 150 feet high and 108 feet across. Both were built on the model of the Roman Pantheon—and now, from this nearby rooftop, both were practically at eye level. New perspective notwithstanding, however, it was incredible to imagine having to sneak a car atop one of them.

  “This tradition continues today,” Story Jack said. In recent years, the Great Dome had had a ringing telephone booth put on it; a sixteen-foot-square, twelve-foot-high house; and a perfectly dimensioned pink nipple, transforming it into the “Great Breast of Knowledge.” Most hacks lasted only twenty-four hours—if that—but the glory, Story Jack made clear, was eternal.

  “At MIT, ‘going hacking’ still means not computer exploits but after-hours exploration—what we’re doing tonight,” he continued. “You ‘pull a hack’ when the hacking leads to something you can show off, but that’s completely optional. Just by being here, you’re hacking.”

  The tour continued with a go-ahead signal from central radio command. The group descended all the way back to one of the basements below the Infinite Corridor, and then a sub-sub-basement two levels below that.

  “These are the steam tunnels—or as we call it, Hell,” Head Jack told them before a squat and rusty metal door that suggested the entrance to a submarine. “You’re going to have to crouch again,” he warned. “And hold your hand up over your face as you walk.”

  “Why?” a worried freshman asked.

  Head Jack shrugged. “It’s a lot easier to explain a burn on your hand than a burn on your face.”

  The freshman gulped but asked nothing more.

  Again, Scout Jack carded the door open. Even in the middle of the line, twenty students back, Alien felt the rush of hot air the moment the lock turned. She followed Cal down a metal ladder to a dark and sweltering narrow corridor crowded on all sides with rows of burning-hot pipes. Head Jack hadn’t been joking: Jacks and freshmen alike advanced slowly with their hands up, palms out, above their foreheads, crouching so low it made their knees ache, and Alien, sweating from the neck, immediately followed suit.

  They emerged after what felt like hours but couldn’t have been more than two or three minutes. Still in a basement machine area, the Jacks pointed out what they called “tombs”: empty, unused spaces, generally created when a building was renovated or extended without updating all the floor plans.

  “Knock, knock,” Head Jack demonstrated, rapping his knuckles against a wall that echoed back instead of thudding, suggesting an open space behind it. Sure enough, circling the area, they found a four-by-eight-by-six-foot tomb between old staircases and a new wall. Someone had blocked the space with a thin metal grate, but Scout Jack removed this with a single pull of his pinky. Inside, the tomb even had a grounded outlet.

  “How thoughtful,” Tail Jack said. “Now you know where to go and study when the library closes. Just bring your own lamp.”

  The biggest tomb lay just beyond a ductwork labyrinth. Because Cal had to crouch again at the loudly humming machinery overhead and Alien didn’t, she saw the artwork before he did. “Look!” She pointed, not bothering to whisper, given the ambient racket and the excited murmurs of others around them.

  Huge logos, each ten to fifteen feet high, filled two tall walls. These were not dashed-off graffiti but carefully wrought full-color murals: a smiling yellow triangular figure holding a daisy in its left hand and the sign HACKITO ERGO SUM in its right, for example, and the now familiar JACK FLOREY’S OLD NO. 5 black label, among a half-dozen others.

  “These are some of MIT’s hacking communities,” Story Jack explained, naming them and the general living group they were associated with: Jack Florey—Fifth East hall on East Campus; James E. Tetazoo III—Third East hall on East Campus; Order of Random Knights—Random Hall, a multi-story dormitory west on Massachusetts Avenue; TEP—the Tau Epsilon Phi fraternity house in Boston; and so on. “Each has its own culture and approach to hacks and hacking, but we all share certain ethics and aesthetics.”

  “What are those?” a freshman asked, pointing to what looked like tiny symbols scrawled across the high ceiling—a seemingly impossible feat without a ladder.

  “Ninety-nine percent of hacking doesn’t have anything to do with pulling a prank,” Story Jack answered. “It’s about exploration, as I said.” The symbols, he went on, were “sign-ins”—the way one hacker tells all the others that he or she discovered or gained access to a particular site, complete with personal mark and date.

  “Sign-ins aren’t graffiti because they’re small and in places so difficult to reach that ordinary people never see them,” he said. “They’re how hackers communicate among themselves and keep track of their history.” The earliest sign-in, found on the fourth floor of Building 10, he told them, dated from 1915.

  “You should only sign in at a location that you’re proud to have found,” Head Jack added. “Real hackers aren’t proud of ‘discovering’ Lobby Seven.”

  They walked on to a sm
aller tomb in which another mural, labeled HACKING ETHICS, listed these and other points of instruction: “Never drink and hack,” Alien read. “Never hack alone. . . . Know your limitations and do not exceed them.” The mural even said, “If you do get caught, accept gracefully and cooperate fully.”

  But Alien didn’t want to think about getting caught. She just wanted to start exploring. Already, her mind raced with ideas for an awesome Alien-themed sign-in logo.

  The group climbed stairs again, this time to the roof of Building 7. Despite hissed reminders to keep ducking single file, Alien couldn’t resist staring up briefly to take in a view of the Little Dome ahead, just a stone’s throw away, like a neighbor’s house you could stroll up to and ask to borrow sugar. The proximity was amazing—as if they were being brought to meet the moon.

  Were they going to walk right to it? she wondered. Were they going to get to touch it?

  Halfway there, a few yards later, Tail Jack halted them. “Watch the gap,” she said, gesturing to the right. What looked like the shortest path to the dome was actually a trick of perspective—ten feet of empty air between two separate buildings. Step into it and you would fall: tour—and life—over.

  A moment later, Alien reached the dome. “Even though this is the Little Dome, it’s actually more visible than the Great Dome because it fronts Mass Ave,” Story Jack told them. For one Halloween hack, he said, it had been covered with six thousand square feet of painted polyethylene sheeting to resemble a Kilroy head and eyes. During a subsequent summer, it had been topped with a papier-mâché snowman. One December it was decorated with electric Christmas lights and presents; another it’d had an eight-foot-tall, ten-foot-wide Hanukkah menorah. And the domes themselves were just two of a dozen popular hacking sites.