Heston cut in after several minutes. As usual, he wore his American flag skirt. “You know these guys are gay,” he said.
Alien laughed. “I don’t think so,” she shouted over the music.
“Their loss, then,” said Heston. “Want to hang out some place where we can hear?”
“Sure!” They walked past a floor-to-ceiling mural of white clouds, a blue sky, and a cute frowny-faced, red-rimmed, orange-rayed cartoon sun.
“How goes it?” Heston asked her outside a relatively quiet side hall.
“Fine,” said Alien, not wanting to kill the buzz by discussing her restless sleep.
“Declare a major?” asked Heston.
“Sixteen-two”—aerospace information systems—Alien said. The choice had been made without much consideration at the beginning of last semester. She’d design computers for space, Alien had thought.
Heston recoiled, which said something. The new semester started next week. All spring, he knew, Alien would be stuck in unified engineering, a two-semester, quadruple-credit forced march through eight major engineering disciplines, widely considered to be the most demanding class at MIT. “Party while you can,” he told her.
They separated and Alien poked her head in other, smaller rooms until she saw another male friend talking to a twitchy, big-chinned guy dressed in a cheesy cardboard-and-aluminum-foil robot costume. Her friend himself wore a suit and tie.
“How much do you want?” he asked.
“Ten,” the robot said.
Alien’s friend looked up, noticed her, and smiled. “You want any?” he asked.
“Sure,” she said. “I’ll take ten too. Thanks.”
Her friend turned, opened a freezer hidden behind a bookcase, and used tweezers to extract a page of tiny white squares—LSD—printed neatly with little pink elephants. He cut each of them a ten-strip. The robot grabbed his immediately, exchanging crumpled bills for the trouble, and ducked out. After Alien gave her friend twenty dollars, he covered her portion in flattened tinfoil he put in a Ziploc bag labeled “♥ POISON ♥” in black Sharpie.
“Remember to get that when you leave,” he said, returning it to the secret freezer.
Alien nodded. She ambled through the next open doorway and found herself in an all-black hallway that curved round . . . and round . . . like a nautilus spiral. Following it felt like stepping dreamily down a rabbit hole. At the center of the maze, Alien reached a peaceful, perfectly circular room filled with couches occupied sedately by other trippers.
“Hey,” she said, seeing Heston again and plopping down on the empty cushion next to him. Something bothered her. A question. “There’s no loft here, is there?” asked Alien. She’d heard another guest mention one.
“L-0-p-h-t ‘loft’?” said Heston. “The hacker group?”
Alien blinked dumbly. “Oh—computer hackers,” she said, uninterested.
“Yeah. A couple of years ago they testified in Congress and said that they could take down the entire Internet in thirty minutes,” Heston told her. “I saw one of them here tonight.”
“Did they do it?” Alien wondered aloud, but Heston’s response, if he had one, came too late for her to process.
Alien woke to total darkness. Her couch seat remained, but the distant music was off, along with all of Frostbyte’s LED creations. And the other couches were empty.
Alien sat up. “Where is everybody?” Her heart pounded.
“You’re up,” a familiar voice said.
“Aziz,” Alien said. Thank God. She sat up, rubbing her sore neck. “What happened?”
“You passed out,” he said. “I stuck around to make sure you were okay.”
“Oh. Thanks for watching out for me.”
Walking together, they followed the smell of spilled beer to last night’s dance floor, where wires protruded from the open back of a full-sized Moon Patrol arcade game. Surrounding walls had been disassembled as well, and a bare light bulb lit the grumpy sun mural.
Alien made her way to the freezer her friend in the suit and tie had shown her behind the bookshelf. She knelt to cache the bag of LSD he’d left her in a khaki-colored traveler’s money belt she used instead of a purse, wrapped tightly around her right ankle.
Aziz waited in the kitchen, which had one of the few windows in the place. Hearing metal grates roll up in the building across the street, Alien looked out. It was still dark, but people in a bakery were loading fresh bread onto trucks.
“What time is it?” she asked.
“Five thirty a.m.,” Aziz answered.
Alien raised her eyebrows. Maybe fifty minutes had passed between taking the G and passing out, she estimated. So I slept only four hours.
Still, she felt totally refreshed.
A week later, Sunday, two p.m., Alien sat behind the student center Coffeehouse counter, shunted to a day shift, and staring at the first page of chapter two of one of her textbooks, Engineering Materials, as she had for hours. Beside her was a day planner in which she’d segmented her to-do list in fifteen-minute increments—“9:30 a.m. Wake/9:45 a.m. Shower and dress/10 a.m. Bike to Radio Shack/10:15 a.m. Get alarm clock battery . . . ”—but the crossed-out accomplishments ended at noon: “Study!” Instead, Alien had filled the edge of the present planner page with a pencil sketch of a male profile.
Alien looked up, exasperated at herself and her predicament. Her aerospace information systems professors wanted rule followers—not artistic types. They created for an intended purpose or specification, whether physical or digital. No one told a space shuttle or airplane designer to “improvise.”
Thud. Something heavy hit the counter, toppling her textbook to the floor. Two fellow sophomores, Brett and Ben, waved from the opposite corner of the Coffeehouse, from where they had sent the object—a bright purple bowling ball—tumbling.
“Sorry!” the guys called.
Alien stood. She returned her textbook to the counter, retrieved the bowling ball, and gently rolled it back.
Halfway across the room, the ball jogged left. Brett, though, hit a button on a black handheld remote control and the ball corrected course, traveling neatly through his legs to Ben.
“You’re getting there,” said Alien. The guys had told her that they were entering bowling’s U.S. Open. Making it to the championship with raw skill would be impossible, so they’d hollowed out the middle of a ball, replaced the core with a remote-controlled gyroscope, and then filled it back in to restore the ball to legal weight and remove any sign of tampering. Now they were debugging.
To have that much free time, Alien thought enviously as Brett and Ben gave her the thumbs-up.
Alien trudged from the Coffeehouse to the library at ten p.m., and from the library to Cal’s room on Fifth East at one a.m. Neither helped the textbook pages turn. Packing it in around five a.m., she walked back to her cramped room off campus. Then, starting at six thirty a.m., just after she’d nodded off, alarms sounded on all sides. Floors creaked, doors slammed, and sinks and showers ran. Her housemates talked, played music, and ran up and down the stairs. Alien tossed and turned.
She got up, eyelids heavy, at two p.m. Still, she had to start studying. Her first big quiz was midday Tuesday. But how to stay awake as long as necessary? How to learn?
Alien walked downstairs to the empty kitchen.
She opened the freezer and rummaged for private Tupperware. Checking to make sure no one else was watching, Alien pulled out the pink elephant LSD from the plastic bag her friend at the Warehouse party had given her. Then she used a pair of nail scissors to snip off a teeny, tiny piece of a square—maybe one eighth of a tab—and swallowed.
Acid, previously, was a very emotional and intense experience for Alien. Take almost a whole tab and she could listen to music or draw for hours. On a bad day the drug could turn on her, propelling her into nightmarish paranoia.
The meager quantity of an eighth of a tab would be different, she reasoned. Her brain was a machine—a kind of computer. With a tool
like LSD, she could manipulate it for maximum performance.
Spreading out her unified engineering materials across the floor of her room, Alien sat, double-clicked her mechanical pencil, and turned her notebook to a fresh page.
Within twenty minutes, Alien’s mind cleared and she enjoyed a creative, caffeine-like buzz.
“The change in the rate of consumption = the fractional rate of growth × the current rate of consumption,” Alien wrote as she read:
dc/dt = r/100
C = C0er(t−t₀)/100
Hours passed. Housemates returned. The sun set. “Dinner! Dinner!” came shouts below, but Alien remained engrossed in Engineering Materials. Close to seven p.m., feeling like she was coming down, she took another eighth of a tab, and then, at midnight, when her roommate went to bed, pushing her to the first-floor living room, another eighth.
Block letters became cursive in her notebook. Cursive letters became tighter, neater, almost calligraphic. Equations flowed:
N/m2= Pa
Mw/m2= MPa
θ= F/A
“Tensile stress is caused by a force pulling at right angles to the face,” wrote Alien. “Shear stress is caused by a force pulling parallel to the face. Stresses are positive when they PULL.” She sketched shimmering three-dimensional drawings to illustrate each lesson.
Alien filled nine pages with notes, switched textbooks to An Introduction to the Mechanics of Solids, and filled seven more.
When she looked up again, it was four a.m.
Drugs solved two problems. Hacking her brain for productivity with microdoses of acid, Alien could focus as long as necessary to study or complete her class assignments. Afterward, measuring out and taking exactly seven and a half milliliters of G, she could fall asleep within minutes and wake refreshed four hours later. Working and sleeping were still not fun, however. For that, Alien had to find her friends.
One base was a 150-person dorm called Senior House (though freshmen, sophomores, juniors, and seniors all lived there), kitty-corner from East Campus, where Alien moved the fall of her junior year. Another was TEP, MIT’s Tau Epsilon Phi house, in Boston. Others were Frostbyte’s lair, the Warehouse, and the Cambridge-area apartments of other recent alums like Aziz, many in well-paid jobs, but still choosing to live communally if they could, with the continued counterculture ideals of artists, misfits, and explorers.
Linking these and hundreds of other locations on and off campus was the college’s computer network and Athena, its operating platform.
Athena had been designed in the 1980s, before most students had their own computers, and its core functions operated via text-based UNIX operating system commands—green type against a black background—not the usual point-and-click icons and menus of Macintosh or Windows. Even now, though, the system, which combined remote storage and distributed applications, was far more powerful—and more popular—than any other form of personal computing at MIT. The idea was, you could connect from anywhere and access central servers hosting your individual files, like papers, problem sets, email, or instant messages, and hundreds of programs for work or play.
Rush week freshman year, for example, it was a public Athena terminal at which Alien chose her username. Later that fall, from another Athena terminal Heston had set up on Fifth East, she sent her viral email dumping Cal. In addition to class work, Alien stored personal photos and digitized music files on her Athena account instead of her own PC, so she could see, play, or share them wherever she went. And, using a standard UNIX command, “finger,” which reported if a user was logged into the computer system, at what Internet address, and how long it had been since his or her last activity, Alien used Athena to locate and keep tabs on friends.
One Tuesday evening in late October she raced through the Infinite Corridor on Rollerblades, narrowly dodging fellow students, carrying a bright yellow sunflower to surprise a new guy she liked, Patrick. Alien knew he was home at Senior House as of seven fifty p.m.—fifteen minutes ago—because she’d just checked from an Athena terminal in the student center.
Alien dashed across sidewalks, streets, and jarring cobblestones, pulled open the heavy wooden door to Senior House, and then continued inside, following carpeting to the elevator, where she hit the button for the fifth floor. Patrick’s door was closed when she got there, however. Alien knocked and opened it. No one was there. At the public Athena terminal in Senior House, she logged in and typed “finger pmurphy” again.
As of 8:07 p.m., the system responded, he was in the basement cluster in Building 66, from whose roof Alien had hung the point.
Alien sighed and rode the elevator back downstairs. Outside again, she shot over slick concrete to the bowels of 66.
One lone screen-lit figure sat in the cluster. Not Patrick. Alien frowned. She skated in and plonked down at a workstation. Fingering Patrick once more, she found he’d just logged in from the office of MIT’s student computer club, SIPB—three floors up from where she’d started.
Dammit.
One more stop, Alien told herself.
SIPB, pronounced in two syllables—“sip-b”—stood for the “student information processing board,” a sign of the club’s origins in the late 1960s, when the entire Internet, then called ARPANET, consisted of a single buggy link between UCLA and Stanford. Inside the office, MIT alumni, dropouts, and random Cambridge-area computer nerds mixed freely with current undergraduates. They shared an almost comically worn tan couch, two shelves of technical books and papers, scattered tools—a drill, an ohm reader, an industrial stapler—and geek art like a Froot Loops cereal box hacked to say “ROOT OOPS” (root being the special username of someone with full and unrestricted access to a computer system) amidst twenty or so high-speed networked terminals.
Alien swept wet hair out of her eyes and searched the room for Patrick, tallying a half-dozen occupants but not him. She logged in herself and saw he’d logged out four minutes earlier—eight forty p.m.
Seriously?
She could find another guy to give the flower to, Alien figured. She had no shortage of worthy crushes on campus. But her new night-shift job at the campus Center for Space Research started at nine p.m. There wasn’t time—there was never enough time—to finger everybody she knew, one by one, just to see who was near enough now to hang out with.
“Hey!” Alien addressed the other people with her in the office. “Is there a command like ‘finger’ that could tell me who’s logged on at a specific machine?”
The first response, from the middle of the room, was a snort. This was Gabe, a junior with silver earrings and close-cropped blue hair, who was sitting next to a squeaky-voiced freshman called Crunch who had graduated from high school the year before at the age of twelve and then entered MIT, no puberty necessary.
“What?” asked Alien. “Is there?” she repeated.
“Yes,” said Gabe.
“Man finger,” Crunch said.
They both laughed.
“Thanks,” she said. Jerks.
“Man,” in this case, meant the UNIX command to search the system’s online manual pages.
“man finger,” Alien typed.
Finger a username and you got the Internet address of the machine he or she was on, she read. Finger at a machine address, though, and it told you who was logged in there.
Got it, Alien thought.
She entered another command, “ifconfig.” Her terminal window filled with numbers. For human use, different locations on the Internet were generally communicated with names: mit.edu, for example, or whitehouse.gov, or yahoo.com. But behind each name was a unique numerical value, its exact position online: x.x.x.x, where each x was a number between 0 and 255. Her computer’s Internet address, it said, was 18.181.0.2.
“finger @18.181.0.2,” Alien typed.
“alien,” the screen returned.
“Cool!” Alien logged out. She leaped up and rolled past the SIPB microwave, soda fridge, and electric tea kettle to a filing cabinet full of Oreos, Chips Ah
oy, Pop Tarts, and ramen packs. Alien deposited two quarters for a pack of Oreos she brought over to a rear-corner terminal at which a tall, thin man in his early forties was typing furiously.
“Hey, Plitman,” Alien said, calling the man, as everyone did, by his username.
Plitman typed on, ignoring her. He had thick glasses and unkempt curly hair, wore a dark blue button-down shirt tucked into beltless khakis, and occupied both his seat and the one next to it, where he had placed a bulging black backpack. “Can I move this for a minute?” Alien asked him, trying to sidle in beside him.
“No, you can not.” Plitman enunciated oddly and avoided eye contact, but his verbal manner, when he spoke, was as direct as a mugger’s knife. “That backpack is holding radio equipment worth two hundred and fifty dollars.”
“Sorry,” Alien said. She straightened her body and stepped back without stepping away. Though neither a current student nor an alum, Plitman basically lived in the SIPB office—he was almost never not here—and he knew as much as or more about Athena and the UNIX operating system than their inventors.
“I’m trying to save time with something,” Alien told him. “Can you help me?” She placed the Oreos on Plitman’s keyboard, along with the drooping flower.
Plitman double-blinked. He nudged the flower aside but took the cookie pack, opened it, ate one Oreo, and then cut a tiny piece of Scotch tape from a roll next to him and carefully resealed the pack.
“I have time to answer one question,” the expert said.
“How can I find out all the machine addresses?” Alien asked him.
Plitman wrinkled his brow in confusion. “At SIPB?” he said.
“No,” said Alien. She raised her arms in an all-encompassing gesture. “At MIT.”
Two a.m., Alien blasted the Rocky Horror Picture Show soundtrack at her post at the Center for Space Research. Earlier this month, a new satellite had launched. In their job manning the lab, the chief responsibility of Alien and other interns was to print out charts and hit the letter “s” once an hour, every hour, day or night, a sort of virtual shoulder tap, it seemed, to make sure the satellite stayed awake.
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