Breaking and Entering

by Jeremy N. Smith

  The heart of the orientation session that followed was a video history of Los Alamos. Native farmers. A boys’ outdoor school. Then army barracks built sixty years earlier for the ultimate security—or insecurity—project: the creation of the atomic bomb.

  Alien had known—vaguely, intellectually—that her new workplace was associated in some way with nuclear weapons. But it had never registered that they were actually conceived, built, and tested right here. Seeing grainy footage of an early mushroom cloud, Alien sat back, staggered, and said, out loud, “Wow.”

  “The Los Alamos National Laboratory plays a key role in our nation’s defense and security, and because you are now an employee of this laboratory, you can become a target of a hostile foreign intelligence service or terrorist group,” she read in her training packet materials. “Regardless of your clearance status, your access to sensitive and classified information at the Laboratory makes you a potential target of nations and individuals who want and need our information.”

  Alien was still processing the warning when Jake came by a little while later to greet her and take her to lunch in the cafeteria. “That’s the building I work in,” he pointed out as they walked the sprawling campus after the meal. “It’s behind the fence.”

  Alien craned her neck to see where he was pointing, but couldn’t tell which of the distant buildings he meant—or, for that matter, which of the many fences. Half a mile later, they reached a low-slung pale brown complex. NOTICE, said a sign outside in red letters. “Each person that has access authorization into this area/facility must: Individually run his or her badge and be authorized by the badge reader/hand geometry unit. Those who do not have access authorization must be escorted.”

  Following Jake’s lead, Alien slid her new badge across a scanner. With two beeps, the door clicked open. He led her down a long linoleum hallway dotted at short intervals with gray civil defense sirens but otherwise identical to countless passages just like it at MIT, including the low hum of heating and cooling pipes and the aroma of burnt coffee. They stopped at a door marked “NIS”—“Nonproliferation and International Security,” Jake translated.

  Inside the NIS administrative offices, Jake introduced Alien to five men and one woman. They were all dressed pretty much the same, in khakis or jeans and a button-down shirt (and, for Jake, his usual multicolored woolen poncho). But their badge colors were different: gray (Alien and one of the men), red (a single person), yellow (three people), and blue (two people, including Jake). Four workers also wore a CRYPTOCard, which looked like a solar calculator and generated a time-synched seven-digit passcode necessary for certain computer logins. Hanging from a separate lanyard for two of them was a thin garage-door-opener-sized black plastic rectangle with two thumbnail-sized slots for metal film.

  “Dosimetry device,” Jake explained. “It measures radiation exposure.”

  Jake walked Alien back outside the office. In the hallway just beyond it was a steel-barred floor-to-ceiling revolving turnstile, like those in a subway station. LIMITED AREA, said a sign colored blue and yellow, indicating the badge colors required for entry. Alien watched as one of the men she’d just met swiped his yellow badge at one scanner, placed his palm on another, and then pushed on through the turnstile before disappearing from sight. She and Jake turned left instead, around a tight corner, and up metal stairs to a dingy, low-ceilinged niche where four black computer stations faced a white concrete wall.

  “This is Sanjay and Toyo,” Jake said, introducing her to two more of her new co-workers at NIS. Both men were grad students—Sanjay from India, Toyo from Japan—and both wore red badges. “You’ll be working next to them.”

  Alien nodded. She realized that “next to them” also meant “on this side of the turnstile,” excluded from areas—like Jake’s office, or anywhere “behind the fence”—where only those with yellow and blue badges could go.

  Even if Los Alamos was a huge, high-security research lab, the “mezzanine of doom,” as Jake called it, where Alien worked alongside Sanjay and Toyo, was, like the hallway leading to it, straight out of MIT. Unpretentious. Utilitarian. A place to log in and work.

  “Okay, kid, let’s get you started,” Jake said. “Go ahead and type in your username.”

  Stiffly, she typed “etessman.” It felt strange. Her fingers wavered. The computer system was different from the Athena boxes she was used to, but still controlled primarily via a UNIX-based command line.

  “Good,” Jake said. “Now we’re going to set up your environment right.”

  From her time at MIT, particularly her early experience writing f script and, later, her work coding NetVision, Alien already knew the essentials of computer programming, including what command line tools she liked to use and how to automate and combine them. But Jake expected efficiency as well as proficiency from his staffers. “The biggest part is key bindings”—keyboard command shortcuts—he told her. “You work most effectively when your fingers never leave the keyboard. Learn the quickest ways to accomplish your most routine tasks, and you will find that you are enormously more productive.”

  What followed was the beginning of Alien’s transformation as a programmer. “These skills will serve you for a lifetime,” Jake continued. Instead of a series of almost haphazard, improvised steps, Alien would need to break all of her tasks down into a careful sequence. Internalize this process and it would become automatic and nearly effortless, like a race car driver shifting gears, or a soldier assembling a rifle.

  Jake spent a full hour with Alien, side by side. They began with her core programming tools, customizing Emacs and GDB, her editor and debugger, and then moved on to the operating system environment itself.

  Along the way, he kept stopping and correcting her, half driving instructor, half drill sergeant.

  “Do it right,” Jake ordered when Alien used the left arrow key to move to the beginning of a line of text. “Is that the most efficient way to do it?”

  “No . . . ,” she said, without yet knowing how to improve. “Is there a better way?”

  “Control-A goes to the beginning of the line,” Jake said. “You don’t have to hold down the arrow key.”

  “Okay.” Alien tried the command, and her cursor shot over. “Got it,” she said. And then they continued.

  “Back a line,” Jake tested her afterward.

  “Forward to line one hundred and twenty-nine.

  “Switch windows.

  “Save buffers.

  “Merge files.

  “Compile.

  “Good.”

  “You’re a slave driver in a poncho,” Alien joked. But she appreciated that Jake’s instructions, especially when taken together, changed the relationship between herself and what was happening on the screen. The more he pushed her, the faster and more elegantly she moved, until the commands at hand felt hers—extensions of Alien’s body—to be used intuitively, as the challenge at hand demanded.

  This was hacking of a kind, not in the sense of breaking into something, but of moving from outsider to insider, user to ace. She was surprised to feel a similar thrill, in its own way as energizing as scaling an elevator shaft or the Great Dome.

  Finally, Alien had the keyboard shortcuts down well enough to dance across anything onscreen in seconds.

  Jake looked on approvingly.

  “Now you’re ready to work,” he said.

  Alien circled twice, but every single parking spot by her building was taken when she arrived at work at ten a.m. one day in early March.

  “Shit,” she muttered to herself. “Morning people.”

  If this were Cambridge, Alien might have circled again, waiting for someone to clear out. At Los Alamos, though, everyone holed up all day once they’d gotten here.

  She could park in the overflow lot, a mile away. Or—Alien smiled—she could “invent” her own spot right here.

  She eased the Volvo forward, past the first parking space closest to the building, and drew to a halt atop a striped yel
low “no parking” area. There—she backed up, straightening the rear of the station wagon to align precisely with the car beside her, so the imaginary space looked official. With the car parked over the yellow stripes, you couldn’t even tell.

  Alien stepped out of the Volvo, walked to her building, swiped her badge, and strolled inside.

  While Jake’s research group worked in nondescript buildings, there was nothing mundane about what they did. They helped manage a unique combination of satellites and multimillion-dollar telescopes and supercomputers. The system operated automatically. When the satellites spotted gamma ray bursts—sudden, seemingly random flashes of high-energy light—across the sky, the telescopes shifted to focus on the action. Then the supercomputers correlated millions of points of observation data to identify patterns or track the presence of new objects, passing word to involved scientists in real time.

  It was an outer space surveillance system, of vital interest to the U.S. military because it could detect clandestine nuclear weapons tests. To a scientist like Jake, what was far more exciting were the breakthrough discoveries in astrophysics it might produce.

  Alien’s job was to improve the underlying code.

  “It’s a rat’s nest of nested ‘If’ statements,” Jake had warned her. “Figure out what everyone before you did and clean it up. If you do a good job, we can release it as free software.”

  Free software. To an outsider, the proposal might have sounded disparaging: free as in worth nothing. But Alien understood it in the sense intended by Jake and the programmers she most admired: free as in contribution. The chance to enrich both the lab and the community of computer scientists and astrophysicists around the world. Proof, with Jake’s guidance and encouragement, that she was participating in a larger aesthetics and ethos of coding.

  At work today in the mezzanine, Alien spent hours, eyes narrowed, analyzing a particularly convoluted section of the software, like a police accident investigator at the scene of a ten-car pileup. Except that, as Alien typed rapidly, using a keyboard shortcut every few seconds, she could reverse time, start over, and replay the pileup again and again, until she realized what each line of code meant to do. Then, rewriting, Alien could take the entire program apart and fix it so that, in effect, the accident never happened.

  “Modularity. Flexibility. Abstraction,” she remembered one of her computer science professors preaching. Modularity meant separating a program’s functions into clear-cut, independent building blocks. Flexibility meant programming in such a way that those functions could be easily modified in the future. Abstraction meant emphasizing the big picture over nuts-and-bolts details—in this case, creating a general tool to identify objects in a collection of astronomical data, not just the data generated by the system specific to the lab.

  Alien’s room was a mess. Her closet. Her car. Her programming, however, was crisp, clean, concise, and clearly commented—meaning she documented everything she did so that any coders who used the software after her could easily understand it.

  “Got you,” she said, rerunning the once problematic section shortly before four p.m., bugs squashed and needless inefficiencies eliminated.

  Alien wished she could show Jake. But the only way to talk in person was for him to come to her. Try entering the high-security areas and guards would stop her in seconds. Her gray badge screamed: I can only be trusted up to a point—literally.

  Alien started dating an officemate, David, who took the seat next to her in the mezzanine after Sanjay’s and Toyo’s stints there ended. He was three or four years older, with a great jawline, wheat-blond hair, striking blue eyes, and a ripped runner’s build. Come spring, he introduced her to a social group of fifteen or so fellow lab employees, ages twenty-five to fifty, who organized offbeat collective Wednesday evening running events at local trailheads, more in the spirit of nerd fun than Los Alamos’s high seriousness.

  “Better drink this quick.” The eldest guy passed Alien and David each a cold Coors. “Hares leave in five minutes,” he said.

  Everyone swigged for the duration. Then a guy and a girl, both redheads in their late twenties—dashed off into knee-high dry yellow grass, trailing flour behind them. Another ten minutes passed and someone yelled, “On, on!” The activity was a hunt of sorts, as elaborate as it was benign.

  Alien, David, and everyone else gave chase.

  The pack spread out, laughing as they followed false and real trails set up in advance by the hares. False trails were marked with three lines: wrong path, backtrack. Real trails led to new beer stops. Here, again, everyone drank, which inspired loud group chants, the more obscene the better.

  It was now almost dark. Alien stumbled, ducking tree branches, tripping on buried rocks. Looping two to three miles—and one or two more beers—she and the others reached the trailhead again, where the hares by now had built a campfire.

  Everyone but designated drivers drank more. They all sang more, too, and then piled back into cars.

  The Los Alamos Hash House Harriers, the group called itself. A drinking club with a running problem.

  Alien wasn’t a big beer drinker. But it was good to hang out and have fun without the usual security measures separating everyone, and to know she wasn’t the only lab employee looking to blow off steam. Afterward, she and David drove to his rental place, a wide-windowed house in rural El Rancho, halfway between Los Alamos and Santa Fe. They stepped out of their sweaty clothes, showered, and then slipped into his outdoor hot tub.

  Alien lay back, communing with the bubbling hot water and sweet sage-ash-scented breeze, taking in the blue-black sky and dense silvery constellations. Perhaps thirty seconds passed, and then—goose bumps—she saw a shooting star.

  “We’re watching space,” she reflected. “But do you ever feel like it’s watching us back?”

  “Isn’t it?” said David. “Satellites and such?”

  “Right.” Alien grimaced. “One, two, three, four,” she counted separate sets of blinking lights among the natural celestial objects.

  They lingered in the tub for another hour, but Alien’s cheery sense of total freedom, she found, had vanished.

  “If the government put telescopes in space instead of on the ground, they could track us or anyone else on Earth,” she said. “They could use my software.”

  David’s wrinkled hand found hers underwater. He squeezed.

  “Probably,” Alien said, “they already do.”

  As summer approached, Alien explored more outside the lab. She visited Ghost Ranch, where Georgia O’Keeffe had lived and kept her studio, and the hand-carved cave dwellings of Bandelier National Monument, rich with intact petroglyphs. She liked to walk barefoot and sometimes topless, better to feel the earth and sun on her skin. The sand burned her feet. She winced and walked on, knowing calluses would make her stronger.

  The first weekend in June, five months after Alien arrived, The Island threw a party. One of the guests, a trim, thinly mustachioed thirtysomething, was the ringmaster of a small traveling circus to which her fire artist housemate belonged. The show needed one more member, he said.

  Alien immediately volunteered, not even asking what she was volunteering for.

  Her debut was the afterparty for a vintage car show in Tucumcari, about 175 miles southeast of Santa Fe along the old Route 66. The stage was the large open lot next to a local biker bar.

  First to perform were silk aerialists—acrobats swinging and spiraling into different positions while hanging from strips of long, stretchy fabric tied to anchors on the roof of the bar. Then the ringmaster strode onstage in a cherry red Sergeant Pepper uniform. Cheered on by the car collectors and bikers, he bound up his girlfriend/“lovely assistant” in an apparently inescapable straitjacket and watched in histrionic astonishment as she twisted and turned herself free. They bantered a bit, and then she somehow passed her whole body though the triangular opening in a wire coat hanger before slipping away to assist the fire artist in setting up for the grand finale.
A white-haired guitarist strummed and sang the old Tex Williams song “Smoke! Smoke! Smoke! (That Cigarette).”

  “And now,” the ringmaster announced, “the Amazing Alien.”

  She stepped forward, fetchingly attired in a miniskirt, billowing white blouse tied high above her midriff, and oversized red heart-shaped sunglasses.

  The ringmaster winked as he made certain the audience got a good look at a half-inch-thick plywood board, two feet wide and five and a half feet long.

  Protruding from the board, an inch apart from one another, were approximately fifteen hundred eight-inch nails, pointy ends gleaming.

  “Sleeping Beauty,” he declared, gesturing toward Alien, “and,” drawing attention back to the prop before him, “the Bed of Nails.” He laid it on the ground, nails up.

  From a dainty crouch, “Sleeping Beauty” prepared to settle down on her back for her rest. The engineer in her knew the secret to the stunt: since only one fifteen hundredth or so of her weight rested on any single nail, she’d be fine. The sensation, Alien had found, practicing by The Island’s garden, was like floating on a sea of toothpicks. But she made a big deal out of holding her breath along with the audience, and then grimaced before breaking out into a huge smile.

  “Amazing indeed!” The ringmaster egged on the clapping crowd.

  The act wasn’t finished. Grinning devilishly, he presented another board, half the length of the first, filled with another thousand nails. This the ringmaster placed on Alien’s stomach and chest, sandwiching her between the spikes.

  Keep smiling, Alien told herself. The top plank rose and fell as she breathed in and out.

  The ringmaster covered Alien’s face with a pillow. On the top plank of nails, mid-chest height, he placed with exaggerated effort a thirty-pound cinder block. And then, Alien knew but could not see, he lifted a sledgehammer by the handle.