Breaking and Entering Read online

  Alien searched her room, inch by inch. All she found that was unusual was a dried-up rose, sitting on her bureau. She moved down the hall, overturning a pile of old computers. Nothing. The LSD was gone.

  Walcott was almost empty. Lauren had more classes to take before graduating, so she and Don still had their room, but the couple were at Burning Man, the tech-hippie art and culture gathering in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert. Shannon was in the army, and two other hallmates had transferred to another dorm. Until any freshmen moved in, that pretty much left Alien and Mace.

  Alien knocked on Mace’s door. He had gone home for the summer to spend time with his father, but returned a week ago to complete his final year of classes. It had surprised Alien how happy seeing him again had made her. Mace’s first night back, they had lain together on his bed, fully clothed, catching up.

  “What are you going to do with your life?” Mace had asked her.

  “Pass physics,” Alien said.

  “I’m serious,” said Mace.

  “Well, I don’t know,” Alien told him. “What are you going to do?”

  “I want to be a farmer,” Mace said.

  “Really?” Alien studied his face.

  Mace nodded. “We all have to work to benefit one another.”

  Alien had never seen him so earnest. They stayed up all night, absorbed in conversation, both surprised when morning light began to shine in through the windows.

  Around nine a.m., they got up.

  “Want to take a shower with me?” Mace asked, standing in the hallway with a towel over his shoulder.

  Alien was tempted but hesitant.

  “Let’s wait,” she said. “I kind of want to take things slow. I’ve moved too fast in the past.”

  Mace looked disappointed.

  Alien smiled. “Soon, I promise,” she said.

  Now there was no answer from Mace’s room. He must be out, Alien thought. It didn’t make sense that he’d take her LSD anyway. Mace could get whatever he wanted from Don, who Alien had finally figured out was dealing what he and Lauren didn’t share.

  The only other place the jewelry box could possibly be was Don and Lauren’s room. In fact, Alien recalled, she had last seen the box there, holding it in her hands while Don fished a beer out of their mini-fridge for her.

  Don and Lauren’s room would be locked while they were out of town, she thought. On a whim, Alien tried the handle anyway.

  The door opened. Surprised, Alien caught her breath. Was someone in there? It was very quiet. She didn’t know Don and Lauren well, and she didn’t want anyone to think she was stealing something.

  Alien cracked the door a little wider. The light was on. That was odd.

  Alien stood outside another moment, debating what to do. She could see the white sink inside their room and was tempted to peer in a bit farther. Should I . . . ? What if the jewelry box is in there?

  Finally, Alien looked at her watch: 9:27 p.m. No time—the tour was starting.

  Shaking her head at her silliness, Alien quickly exited the hall.

  Alien chose black tea from the Coffeehouse supply cabinet and prepared to wait the fifty-five seconds the microwave was counting down to make hot water. Two a.m. had just passed. After showing off all night for the awed freshmen, she wished she’d been able to join the other Jacks in the courtyard afterward, adding her own stories to the MIT hacking legends instead of coming straight here to cover the second half of a shift.

  And tool for next week’s physics exam, she reminded herself. The academic axe, when it fell, fell sharply. None other than François, who projected total invulnerability, had flunked out of MIT at the end of last semester. Alien was still getting used to the relative quiet when she crossed the hallway, and the absence of his French flag.

  The Coffeehouse phone rang seconds before the microwave sounded. “Alien?” a stricken voice asked when she picked up. It was Cal.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  When he told her, Alien ran back to Fifth East as fast as she could.

  When Alien got there, there were deans in the Goodale lounge, talking in hushed tones with students. Everyone sat together under the drawing of Krotus. Sam gulped rapidly, as if literally having to swallow the deans’ words to process them. Vanessa hugged Rochelle, who was weeping. Heston, eyes red, focused fiercely on the floor, and mechanically smoothed and re-smoothed his skirt. Even Rex seemed small and powerless. There was a nice cheese-and-fruit plate on the sticky wooden table where Alex and Vlad had helped Alien with her problem sets. It was eerily quiet.

  Cal stood to greet Alien, but she turned from him and walked down the stairs. Outside again, Alien stood alone on the lawn. There was an ambulance in the middle of the grass by the picnic tables. She scanned the dorm through the full-length windows in the stairwell on every level. After a little while, she heard movement by the door she’d exited just a few hours earlier.

  Alien watched as the paramedics slowly carried Mace’s body on a stretcher down all five flights of stairs.

  An older gentleman—either a journalist or some kind of MIT staff member, she supposed—walked up and stood next to Alien.

  “Were you his girlfriend?” he asked gently.

  His use of the past tense told her all she needed to know.

  “No,” Alien said.

  The paramedics finally arrived at the ground floor. They rolled Mace’s body into the ambulance and slammed the doors shut. It rolled right back out. They stopped and looked on in surprise, and then shoved the cart back and slammed the doors again. It rolled right back out a second time.

  The third time, they shoved it in there really fast and slammed the rear doors quickly. Then the ambulance drove off.

  The driver didn’t bother to put on the lights.

  Back on the hall, the police questioned Alien. She said she didn’t know Mace. They were happy to leave her alone after that, already having their hands full bagging and cataloging all the drugs they’d discovered in Don and Lauren’s room, beginning with the tank of nitrous.

  The gas produced an intense euphoria but could deplete the brain of oxygen when over-inhaled. Mace had suffocated when the plastic garbage bag fell on his face.

  Alien stepped across police tape to get to her room. She took her hacking clothes off and had a long shower, feeling the entire time like she would vomit. When she had changed, she came out again. A fresh-faced campus police officer stood outside Don and Lauren’s room.

  Alien nodded at him.

  He nodded back kindly.

  “What was the time of death?” asked Alien.

  The young cop’s brow wrinkled. “About nine thirty,” he said.

  The next morning, a front-page story in The Tech suggested Mace’s death might have been a suicide. “No way,” his friends said. They divided up and spread across campus, stealing the issues—over four thousand copies—off the shelves as they were delivered.

  Other newspaper headlines screamed, MIT STUDENT FOUND DEAD OF NITROUS OXIDE. Television crews swarmed the dorm, blocking Ames Street with their vans, harassing anyone who went into the building for an interview. When Aziz “accidentally” knocked a camera out of the hands of a particularly pushy reporter, everyone on the hall congratulated him. Once inside again, though, Alien tried to look out her window. Peering right back at her was a video camera. A news station had run it and all the necessary cables up with poles. Alien pulled down her shade. She had to get out of there.

  After twenty-four hours, most of the folks from the hall had disappeared. Alien was exhausted but still too wired to sleep. Her feet grazed the clothes she’d thrown off the night before. Now they seemed like the outfit of a totally different person—as ridiculous and remote to her as a hoopskirt. No one saw you when you went hacking. No one got hurt. Those were the rules. But Mace’s death had made all that a joke.

  Alien grabbed her Leatherman from the crumpled clothes pile and walked back outside. She must have wandered around Cambridge for hours, because i
t was dawn when she reached Aziz’s house. She rang the bell over and over again.

  No answer.

  Alien had never felt this alone in her life. She had been so sure that Mace was only interested in her for sex. But what if he hadn’t been? What if he had really cared? She should never have waited to find out. If she had given him the chance, maybe she could have made Mace come out hacking with her instead of staying home alone. Maybe she could have saved him.

  Before she knew it, the blade of the Leatherman was out.

  Alien studied the vein in her arm, where they had fed her during her time at the inpatient ward. She lived. Mace died. It didn’t make sense.

  Alien sliced.

  The blade was extremely sharp, the cut thin and deep. Bright red blood ran down her arm. Alien had missed the vein by millimeters, but she still bled profusely, sitting on Aziz’s doorstep. The pain was like an ice-cold bath filled with electric current.

  Alien pictured knocking on a neighbor’s door for help. It was a terrible idea, she decided. They might call the police, or worse, her mother.

  “You know what’s going to happen now?” Rex had said. “A bunch of outsiders are going to say that this means students need reining in. Someone will file a lawsuit. Then the college will hire a dozen new administrators to be babysitters. And we know—and Mace knew—that that’s bullshit. MIT students have always managed themselves. That’s the culture. And you can’t say, ‘Welcome—it’s up to you to invent the future,’ and then spend the rest of the year making us sign permission slips for every step we take.”

  Alien knew Mace would agree. I hate that safety net. Some people rafted whitewater rivers. Some people went skydiving. Some people hacked. You want to stay inside, playing it safe all day? Go ahead—but what was the point of living if you never took any risks? Maybe the best way to honor the dead was to push the boundaries of exploration in a new direction.

  How, though? Alien wished she could ask Mace. Live—and feel this kind of pain? Or cut again—and be relieved?

  Alien gagged. She tried standing. No go. Everything hurt so much.

  She knocked on Aziz’s door again and threw a couple of pebbles at his window. Alien felt awful, sick and woozy. He wasn’t there.

  She slumped over on the steps.

  Aziz’s door opened. A big warm body enveloped Alien in a hug. She stared up and saw wide, scared dark brown eyes staring back at her, and then a scraggly black beard and ponytail. Then Aziz carried her inside and carefully cleaned up her arm.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  Alien cried. “We let Mace break the rule about hacking alone.”

  It was a blustery Wednesday evening in mid-October. Painted pumpkins and spiderwebs, witches’ hats and black cats decorated Main Street shop windows, and rain from an earlier shower still wet the pavement. Alien’s last classes had ended at five p.m. and she was hurrying home for dinner before her nine p.m. Coffeehouse shift started. She stopped short, though, when she saw the sidewalk square a few steps from the entrance to the Kendall T station.

  In the cement, someone had scrawled a single word: “Mace.”

  It was him, Alien thought. She knew Mace himself had written it.

  Six weeks ago she had moved out of Fifth East—off campus, in fact, to the student living group with the fire pole. Alien had a tiny room, hardly bigger than a mattress. Everyone called it the Coffin.

  In the aftermath of Mace’s death, Alex’s parents had made him transfer to Virginia Tech, closer to home. Vlad had moved back to Romania. Sam and Rochelle were both taking the semester off. Psych treatment, people said.

  Zhu had turned from lock picking to launching his own software company, making a garage in Boston’s Chinatown his world headquarters on the way to dot-com millions. Both Vanessa and Rex were working for him, which meant they were barely ever on campus either. Heston was never leaving MIT—he’d gotten an undergraduate research position at the Media Lab—but he had moved into the Warehouse, a communal living space for artists and engineers in South Boston, and Alien had bounced between there and a couch in Aziz’s house until her new living situation started. That left Cal and a couple of juniors as the elder statesmen of Fifth East.

  The entire group had gathered together one last time three days after Mace’s body was found, when the charter bus to take them to the funeral arrived at East Campus at four a.m.—a fitting hour, given all their late nights, Alien had thought. The doors opened and she had stepped on wearing the same black pumps, tights, and dress in which she’d had her high school yearbook photo taken. It was the kind of outfit that everyone on Fifth East would have made fun of—except that Vanessa and Rochelle each wore something similar, and the guys all had on suits and ties. And if anyone but Aziz noticed the incongruous red bandana Alien wore over the bend in her left arm and wondered why she wore it, no one commented aloud to her.

  They had ridden three hours to Mace’s hometown, a few miles from the Connecticut–New York border, somewhere farmy with huge white stone houses. Mace had a beautiful blond teenage sister, Alien discovered. His father was a small thin man with graying hair—so different from the tall, strong, athletic Mace. Both shook her hand in a receiving line outside an Episcopal church in which Alien had sat in a back pew, staring up at the statue of Jesus on the cross in front, hearing the words of the service without really listening. Everyone spoke about “Matthew,” not the person she’d known, however briefly—Mace.

  Alien’s scheduled electricity and magnetism makeup exam was the same day as the funeral. Given the circumstances, the physics department decided to let her just take the class all over again and have the new grade count for the previous term. Alien was certain that Mace would have laughed to know that he was the only reason she didn’t flunk.

  Don and Lauren were arraigned when they came back to Cambridge. They were charged with four counts of possession with intent to distribute hallucinogenic mushrooms, amphetamines, marijuana, and nitrous oxide, but they hired a lawyer good enough to keep them out of jail.

  Alien let these and other memories wash over her as she studied the surprise sidewalk marking. She squeezed her arm where she had cut herself, an almost unconscious gesture, repeated dozens of times a day. By now the wound was almost healed. But the hacking world as she knew it—painful and cultish, addictive and intoxicating—was over.

  Or so she had thought.

  // Part II:

  In Security

  05 / /

  Up All Night

  Boston. January 2000.

  Alien had trouble sleeping for months after Mace’s death. She wanted to talk to him, and couldn’t. She wanted to apologize. She wanted to say “I love you,” which she never had. Mace’s smile was frozen in memory, but other details—the scent of his aftershave, their last words to each other, even whether they were ever really friends—had vanished. Without her Fifth East family, Alien wondered what she was doing and why she was at MIT.

  In January 2000 the Warehouse threw a party. For Alien, getting there entailed a midnight trek via T and on foot to an off-white seven-story building in South Boston. She entered, climbed black-painted, unevenly sloping concrete stairs, and banged hard—bam! bam! bam!—on a metal door.

  The door cracked open. A trim man with a rakish beard and darting eyes shrouded monkishly by a black hoodie peered out at her.

  “Hey, Frostbyte,” Alien said. She knew better than to hug the reserved artist and brain hacker.

  Frostbyte flashed a brief smile. “Welcome.”

  Frostbyte led Alien through a maze of low-ceilinged rooms formed by makeshift walls and concrete columns at least three feet in diameter. A vast central area held bright, beautiful pulsing lights and dozens, maybe hundreds, of other partiers, dancing to computer-generated beats and some kind of amplified keyboard and string instrument combo. Their warmth—both human and electronic—was bliss-making.

  Parting from her host, Alien reached a crowded camp-style kitchen offering cheese cubes, peanut butt
er cups, juices, sodas, beer, and liquor. The smell of pot wafted through the air. An older man dressed in a faded orange T-shirt and leather sandals stood at the counter, holding a curious-looking blue liquid in a glass pint jar.

  “Have you had any alcohol?” he asked.

  “No,” Alien answered truthfully.

  “Want some G?” he said. “You can’t mix it with booze, but if you haven’t had any . . .”—the guy shrugged—“good times.”

  “Hmm,” said Alien. “How do you know how much to take?”

  “A normal dose is five to ten milliliters,” the guy said, picking up a clear plastic syringe. “I’ll start you off at seven.” He poured orange juice into the cup and squirted a dose of blue fluid into it. Then he added, “If you take too much, you just fall asleep.”

  “Would have come in handy last night,” said Alien. “Thanks.” She picked up the cup and drank, wincing at the salty taste.

  Alien wandered. The Warehouse seemed to evolve week to week. Recently she had helped to solder hundreds of LEDs on Frostbyte’s giant six-by-seven-foot light wall, which she now found on display in a corner, finished. “Shadow Engine,” Frostbyte called it.

  Alien shifted and eleven hundred motion-sensor-paired LEDs lit up in concert with her movements.

  She reentered the open area filled with dancers, minglers, DJs, and musicians. A four-foot-diameter half sphere light sculpture overhead lit everyone neon green, blue, purple, pink, red, and orange. Two guys her age approached Alien. One was white—Fred—one Hispanic—Eddie—but both were lithe and muscular, with wide smiles and short-cropped black hair. Alien danced between them, watching the shadows and colors change on their tight-fitting shirts.