Breaking and Entering Read online

  “Better than sex,” said Rex.

  Vanessa kicked him.

  “Sorry, dear,” he joked.

  They crossed back to the ducts crisscrossing the top of the mural room. These led over an incomplete wall and let them drop down in a new machine room. Here metal stairs led to a caged second level. Inside the cage was a huge blowing fan, helping circulate air throughout the entire building above them. The roaring blades, Alien guessed, must be at least ten feet long.

  The cage was locked, but Zhu, the deftest touch among them with lock picks, got it open easily. “He’s not going in there, is he?” Alien asked Cal.

  Rochelle overheard her. “We don’t just pick locks to pick locks,” she said. “We pick locks to see what’s on the other side.”

  Zhu entered, followed by everyone but Sam, who kept watch, just in case. Cal shrugged at Alien and then crossed the threshold.

  Alien bit her lip. The hairs on her arms stood on end. She was terrified. But she hadn’t come this far to be left behind. Stepping forward after Cal, she heard a final word of instruction from Sam. “Don’t die!” he shouted jovially above the roar of the blades.

  Because the fan blew outward, anything—and anyone—behind it was sucked directly toward it. Even before she had entered completely, Alien had to steel her heels and fight hard to resist the air current. Its force was incredible.

  She looked up, curious to see how the others were handling the constant buffeting. Zhu and Cal crouched, squinting. Vanessa and Rochelle gripped the coils of the cage, as she did. Only Rex, big enough to counter the fan with gravity alone, stood free and upright. He beamed, seemingly refreshed by the hurricane. He shouted something to them. It was impossible to hear, however. Rex repeated himself, mouthing slowly. The wind rippled his beard.

  Zhu understood first. He shouted too. Then Vanessa and Rochelle, then Cal, and finally Alien herself. Then all together.

  “IHTFP!” Rex had been saying. MIT’s mordant unofficial motto: “I Hate This Fucking Place.”

  Alien closed her eyes. The fan was a kind of confessional. They could say whatever they wanted here. They could tell anyone anything. No one would understand. Then the fan would suck their words away.

  “Fuck, I’m tired!” Alien said. “Fuck this place!” She opened her eyes, saw everybody watching her, and unbuttoned her shirt for show. “Fuck, it’s cold!”

  Her baggy shirt blew open. Alien watched a button whip away, straight into the speeding blades. A second later, the fan spit back shards. Alien and the others recoiled, but the tiny bits and pieces were immediately drawn back and sucked away to some classroom upstairs.

  They laughed, panting, until tears formed around their eyes—tears immediately wiped dry.

  Twenty minutes later, the roar of the fan was finally fading in Alien’s ears as they had all shuffled to and halfway through the steam tunnel inferno, hands up and out over their foreheads in the now familiar protective pose.

  “What’s this?” Zhu said, in front again. He pointed out a side passage illuminated by what seemed like a bright but distant light. “Have you seen this?” he asked the other upperclassmen. They shook their heads.

  “Well . . . ?” Zhu looked for confirmation to proceed. They were all sweating.

  “Why not?” Rex said. “Can’t be worse than Hell, can it?”

  “Yeah,” Sam said. “Let’s check it out.”

  Alien grinned at Cal. Their first hacking expedition as official Fifth East residents and already they’d reached terra incognita for the older students. And the ceiling above the side route was bare.

  “Pass those Sharpies,” Rochelle said.

  Alien and Cal did. Before proceeding, everyone signed in.

  Zhu led them down the new passage. The light increased. At the turn, Alien saw why: above them, five feet to the left, was a metal sidewalk grate. A streetlight overhead must have been shining down through it.

  This time Zhu didn’t wait for anyone’s go-ahead signal. Working steadily but excitedly, he opened his Leatherman and wiggled out a single screw at each end of the grate.

  “And up we go,” Rex said, lifting.

  They emerged to what could have been a Hollywood stage set of a city street: sidewalk, trees, parked cars, tall buildings—all, at this hour, silent and empty. The ground was wet, though; it had rained while they were down below, Alien realized. She kicked the screws, which rolled into a curbside puddle.

  “This must be new construction,” Vanessa whispered. She did page layout for The Tech, the student newspaper, which meant she knew all the MIT news. “Supposedly some old dude is about to give fifty million bucks to build a human genome something.”

  “Yeah,” Sam joked. “They’re cloning Rex.”

  But Rex himself had raised his hand. He gestured to Zhu, who was pointing at a driveway maybe fifteen feet in front of them. A car there had turned on its headlights. A campus police car, Alien realized.

  “Do. Not. Run,” Sam reminded everyone, speaking out of the side of his mouth. Still, he and they walked extremely briskly down the block in the opposite direction, around the corner, and back inside.

  A minute later, they were back along the Infinite Corridor again, strolling innocently. When Sam started whistling, Alien had to hold back cheers.

  This was magic—and they had gotten away with it! Was there anything better than entering somewhere you weren’t supposed to be and then exiting somewhere you’d never been?

  Hacking, the whole school—the whole city, the whole world—was your playground. You went where you wanted and did what you chose.

  Alien was at the classroom by nine thirty a.m. She’d just slip in quietly, she planned. She couldn’t have missed much. And if she had—well, with some subjects, less was more.

  Her first class of the morning, single variable calculus, had started half an hour earlier. By coincidence, its location was the same large lecture hall in Building 54 where her hacking tour had begun. After waking little more than five hours after her emergence from the sidewalk grate, Alien had tromped outside to Building 66, where she followed the secret basement tunnel shortcut to the classroom door.

  Sighing deeply, Alien stepped inside. The professor, a bald man in his mid-forties with a halo of brown curly hair and a bulbous red nose, had already filled four of the six chalkboards with equations. Some 250 students sat attentively, taking notes. Front-row center, directly in front of the professor, was a cardboard banker box for turning in completed problem sets.

  There are two kinds of nightmares: the ones you wake up from and the ones you just have to live through because you’re already awake. This was the latter. Cringing, Alien descended aisle after aisle, problem set in hand. “Sorry,” she mouthed to the professor when she reached the front and added her work to the top of the pile.

  He scowled at her and then turned to resume scribbling, raising a cloud of chalk as he went:

  0 ≤ (−x)2 = (−x)(−x) = ((−1)x)((−1)x) = (((−1)x)(−1))x = ((−1)(x(−1)))x = (((−1)(−1))x)x = (1x)x = xx = x2

  “Therefore,” he said, “the square of any real number is non-negative.”

  Alien yawned, considering whether to sit and try to copy down the entire equation in her notebook as the students to the left and right of her were doing. Why fake it, though? MIT professors were undoubtedly brilliant people. But no one had hired them because of their teaching ability. And attendance had almost no role in grading. To pass her classes, going to them any longer than it took to drop her problem sets off was a waste of time.

  Alien turned around and walked out, an alternative already in mind.

  Strange hands grabbed Alien’s shoulders. It was a crude, aggressive gesture—more pinch than rub. She knew immediately that it wasn’t Cal.

  Alien forced a smile and turned from preparing mac and cheese in the hall kitchen to face Alex, a pockmarked sophomore guy who’d agreed to explain her physics problem set material to her. They’d gone hacking together, but she didn’t know him we
ll. Just that he was one of the few Fifth Easters with a passing GPA and that the more she complimented him on how smart he was and how little she knew by comparison, the happier he was to help.

  “Need something?” Alien asked him with strained sweetness.

  Alex stared at her chest. “Just checking on you,” he said.

  “This will be ready in a minute,” Alien told him. “Why don’t you wait for me in the lounge?”

  Soon afterward, she carried forks and the steaming pot out to the lounge’s black-painted wooden table, where Alex waited with his roommate, a tall, pale eastern European student, Vlad. Vlad’s claim to fame was single-handedly taking Romania to a top-five finish in the International Math Olympiad. Though the temptations of life on Fifth East had lured him from purely academic rigors, with a sufficiently stroked ego, he too could condescend to tutoring.

  “Interesting fact,” Alex was saying when Alien entered. “Forty-five percent of MIT students are women. If you look at IQ distributions, though, especially in math and science, it should be fifteen percent.”

  Vlad chuckled, already anticipating the upshot.

  “So,” said Alex, “every time you see three women together on campus, remember—”

  “One is here because she has brains,” Vlad said. “Two are here because they have—”

  “Dinner,” Alien interrupted, dropping the pot on the table with a thud. While the food cooled, she pushed a problem set from her backpack on each of them. “If you could just check these for me . . . ,” Alien said.

  “One minute,” Alex said. He surveyed her physics work: “Wrong; wrong; wrong; laughably wrong; so wrong it’s almost beautiful.”

  Vlad laughed. He shook his head at her math equations. “I don’t even know what notation this is,” he said.

  Alien looked back and forth between them. She laughed herself. “Can you possibly explain it?” she asked, taking a seat between them. “This is really hard. And”—Alien scooted in, spread her legs, and played footsie with each of them independently under the table—“I’d really appreciate it.”

  Alex gulped. Vlad’s face reddened. They both nodded.

  We’re using each other, Alien thought as the guys competed to be the first to scribble out answers. The only difference is that I know it and they don’t.

  Cal had his own distractions. On the black Bemis hallway, Zhu and Rex started hosting large group lock-picking sessions. Cal joined them night after night. Alien stood briefly at the periphery, gathering the general principles, but tuned out after ten minutes of pick and pin work. This was mere “practice” hacking, she felt. Persuading Alex and Vlad to finish her problem sets for her without actually giving them any play was far more interesting.

  “Hey, are you ready?” she asked Cal one night the second week in a row he was spending tinkering. They had planned to grab dinner together, and she was getting hungry.

  “I’m busy,” he said without looking up at her.

  Bored, Alien took out her backpack and idly drew a Krotus figure on the back pocket with a paint marker. To preserve the drawing, she covered it with nail polish.

  “Now?” she said.

  Cal shook his head. “One minute,” he muttered.

  Alien waited fifteen. “I haven’t eaten all day,” she said. “Can we go?”

  Cal ignored her.

  Now Alien was really annoyed. “You want to open a lock so badly? Just fucking cut it,” she said.

  A line of lock pickers looked up at them. They were all barefoot, following François’s example, though François himself was too cool to participate in group activities.

  “You’re being dumb,” Cal said. Playing to their audience instead of apologizing to Alien, he quoted a line from the hacking ethics mural: “‘Brute force is the last resort of the incompetent.’”

  “That just means it’s the first resort of the competent,” Alien said.

  Furious, she strode down Bemis to Heston’s room, where she found Heston and Rochelle playing a dice game and smoking.

  Heston, the engineering wizard, had transformed spare parts into his own networked computer terminal just like the public ones at the student center.

  “Let me use it,” Alien demanded. “I have to dump someone.”

  Heston raised an eyebrow, but Rochelle was quick to second her. “Yeah,” she said. “Angry lady.”

  Heston, amused, stood and gestured to his empty desk chair: All yours.

  “We’re done,” Alien typed. She was a passionate person and had a right to her feelings, she believed. Cal had wanted to be involved. They had lost their virginity together. And now he was ignoring—or, worse, insulting—her.

  “Don’t just send it to him,” Rochelle said. “Send it to the hall.”

  Alien nodded. She changed the recipient field of her email from Cal’s address to that for the entire Fifth East mailing list.

  At this point, François entered the room. When the others told him what was happening, he read Alien’s email over her shoulder, tsking.

  “You call that a breakup?” François said.

  “Well, what else should I say?” Alien asked him.

  “Put a picture in.” François took the keyboard from her, typed rapidly, and pulled up and pasted in an ASCII text art representation of a raised middle finger:

  ....................../´¯/)

  ....................,/¯../

  .................../..../

  ............./´¯/'...'/´¯¯`·¸

  ........../'/.../..../......./¨¯

  ........('(...´...´.... ¯~/'...')

  ..........................'...../

  ..........''............. _.·´

  ..........................(

  ..............................

  “There,” he said. “Much better.”

  Alien laughed. Showing off herself, she added a caption: “This is not a drawing of your four-balled dick.”

  Heston, Rochelle, and François all hooted. “Yes!” they said.

  Alien hit Send.

  Within ten minutes, Alien’s email was part of a thirty-message thread. Within an hour, it had been forwarded across the campus. By the following afternoon, it had crossed the country and reached a colleague of Cal’s mother, who happened to be a college administrator herself somewhere in Ohio.

  After her colleague made the final forward, Cal’s mom called him. “Are you okay?” she asked.

  By nightfall, the entire story of “Four Balls Cal” was already Fifth East legend.

  Although Cal quickly forgave her, laughing it off, Alien was mortified at what she had started. She spent the last of her savings—$180, accumulated in $5.15-an-hour increments at a summer office job—to buy all the flowers from the (thrilled) flower lady at the Kendall T station and arranged the seven dozen roses, lilies, snapdragons, and sunflowers as best she could outside Cal’s door.

  It was an apology, not an attempt to get back together. She was determinedly single now, she decided, and capped the change by dyeing her hair orange.

  The MIT student center had opened in 1965 and looked it. Its beige concrete exterior repelled examination. Inside, scuffed linoleum floors and flickering fluorescent lights created a dingy atmosphere reminiscent of an airport security screening area. Banks, a bookstore, a post office, and other services clustered near the entrance with a small food court and convenience store, followed by computer terminals, event rooms, and group study spaces. Farther afield were student group and administrative department offices.

  Alien climbed two flights of stairs to her new place of employment. Thanks to low-interest loans, her parents had said that they could cover her housing and tuition. Any money for food and clothing she’d have to earn herself.

  At the third floor the stairs ended at a tight rectangular lounge decorated with stained, sunken couches and dented tables and chairs. Here, Alien had observed, there was always at least one student studying, one student sleeping, and one student planning something devious�
�which is not to say a single MIT student could not be doing all of those things at the same time. Sniff and the odor of burnt coffee and microwave burritos predominated. From a back room came the steady clinks and occasional whoops of people playing pool.

  This was the 24-Hour Coffeehouse. Alien had a regular ten p.m. to six a.m. shift.

  She was grateful for the job. Working at the Coffeehouse, she was being paid to stay up late. Alien had weekends off but still came here as a patron. Saturdays at midnight, Fifth Easters met others in the back poolroom to plan new hacks.

  This Saturday, Sam, Zhu, Cal, and Alex showed up a little after eleven p.m., followed half an hour later by Rex and Vanessa. By midnight, ten hackers—sometimes friends, sometimes rivals—had filled the back room.

  Besides her hallmates, Alien identified a hefty man in his mid-twenties, bearded and swarthy, with doughy cheeks and a neatly tied jet-black ponytail; a young buzz-cut blonde with a barbell-style lower lip piercing and a branching tree tattoo referring to a famous computer algorithm along her long neck; and a Jewfro’d figure wearing a vintage NIXON’S THE ONE! campaign button over the pocket of his bright green polyester Hawaiian shirt. These were Aziz, a Fifth East alum employed by a Defense Department contractor, who had helped lead the legendary police-car-on-the-dome hack; Rpunzel, a West Campus sophomore so named because she had entered MIT with hip-length hair, since shorn and sold to raise money for a venture that combined handicrafts and electronics; and Splotz—Seth Plotz—the Third East graduate resident tutor, expert in pyrotechnics, who set off a daily explosion, bringing a literal sonic boom every day at five p.m. to East Campus.

  With them and others, in the last three weeks alone Alien had traversed the hot steam tunnels enough times that she now could do so blindfolded, built up sufficient calluses to walk back and forth over broken glass in her bare feet without injury, and been given her own hacking card, a sturdy yet flexible laminated strip little bigger than a business card, capable of being used to open many doors without lock picking.