Drastic cost-cutting measures were now in order at Deus Ex Machina Software Inc. But I wasn’t sure how risking electrocution and another arrest---this time by the not-nearly-as-sympathetic Cambridge Police---was really the most efficient way to cut corners.
The cost-saving measure in question was to cancel the dedicated data circuit between Casa Deus and the Broadway offices, steal a NYNEX truck and a cherry picker, and hand-string our own replacement fiber across a mile of telephone poles---all over the course of one night. No biggie for the experienced hacker.
"Look," said Sascha breathlessly, with the most positive energy he’d had in weeks. "We already have the fiber around the office. If we all cooperate, and with the right equipment, we can get it done in a few hours. So all we need is the right equipment---which we can get. And not only will this save us $500 a month, we can also speed up our connection to one that costs the equivalent of $10,000 a month. That’s $10,500 per month, which comes out to $126,000 in savings per year." Nobody could really argue with that.
Sascha never questioned that this was anything but a reasonable option. Nobody questioned him, either. "The phone company is so bureaucratical. They’ll never know. I assume, considering the way they’ve screwed up our orders so many times in the past, that even a guy on top of a telephone pole wouldn’t know what was going on."
Truth was, I think Sascha needed to feel powerful. The only way he could regain his professional pride was by organizing one of the most outrageous stunts he had ever committed---in the name of rational budgetary constraints. How sad to be going through your midlife crisis at age 30.
But the rest of the guys---including Frick, oddly---seemed to be into the idea.
"Damn, you’re good," said Drexler approvingly. Catfood ran off to practice talking like a phone company dispatcher.
But Sascha had higher aspirations, apparently, then just being good.
"We pull this off, and I am King of Cambridge!" He did a little dance to indicate his incipient royalty. "We will be all-powerful!"
"Uhh...I hate to sound like a wife here," I said, "but what about things like, oh, say, electrocution? Wendy wouldn’t much like it if her kid was born without a father. Or one that’s in jail. You get my point."
"Eh, don’t worry about it," said Jonathan. "I rappel for fun. The high-voltage wires are at least a couple of feet above the phone lines. Trivial. And anyway, you’re going to help us, right?"
*
There is not much to prepare you, especially if you did not attend MIT, for standing on Mass. Ave. at 2 a.m. with a walkie-talkie in hand as a pilfered cherry picker driven by your husband inches down the street.
Catfood was taking pictures. "This is like photographing a murder," I hissed at him as he snapped by.
"I’ll develop the roll myself," he said, unconcerned.
It was just me and the crew---Sascha, Jonathan, Ian, Frick, Drexler, and Catfood. Wendy was at home with a medical crisis. Her midwife had warned her that she might go into premature labor if she exerted herself too much, which basically meant anything more than getting out of bed. Her stress levels were way too high---the most likely cause being Deus Ex Machina’s quickly dwindling financial resources, for which she held herself responsible. Jonathan had his pager in case there was a problem---although there wouldn’t be a whole lot he could do while on top of a telephone pole, except for maybe jack in and call her to say she had to go to the hospital by herself.
Wiring the fiber was going to take two long steps. The first step would be to pull a steel cable parallel to the telephone lines. The second step would be to tie the fiber to the cable. There was a special machine inside the truck that did this, sort of a cross between a giant spool of thread and a sewing machine. Ideally, this setup would involve two cherry pickers and two NYNEX trucks, but we weren’t that lucky. Catfood could only do so much before the telephone company started to get suspicious.
Jonathan scrambled to the top of the first pole to scout out the situation. "We’ve got a lot of work to do up here," he shouted down, much too loudly, I thought. Why hadn’t we thought about better disguises?
"It’s going to be light out in a couple of hours," Sascha said over his walkie-talkie, careful, I was sure, to avoid the police channels. "We have to move fast. Otherwise, we’re dead."
"Or in jail," I reminded him.
Ian jumped into the cab of the cherry picker. Frick parked the phone company truck. Sascha loaded the first pieces of steel cable into the cherry-picker’s claw and gave Ian the go-ahead to lift him up. He soared towards the street lights, pulling on a pair of big work gloves. Jonathan jumped into the box as Sascha rose to meet him.
Being on the ground during all of this was like being a goalie in a hockey game. No flash, no glory; I just had to sit and wait until I saw a cop car or something equally bad, then warn them about the car’s exact coordinates and speed, without being frantic. Frankly, if I had had the technical skill, I would much rather have been up there near the live wires.
A June night in a marginal area of Cambridge is a good locale for a regular police posse. But for some reason, crime had been particularly low so far this summer, and cruisers were relatively infrequent. Drexler had spent a couple of sleepless nights in the area we were about to cover, checking the number and frequency of police patrols. We were most in danger of being caught on Mass. Ave. because of our exposure. A few blocks east, though, in what was politely known as Area 4, midnight gunfire was not uncommon. More police would be around, but they’d be looking for genuine criminals. And the Area 4 Neighborhood Watch folks probably wouldn’t think twice about some middle-of-the-night phone repairs.
Just in case, though, if we were worried about police presence, we had a couple of backups. Our friends on this side of Mass. Ave. were prepared to stage an outdoors "domestic dispute" at the exact time the police car would drive by us; in Area 4, some other friends would have a cruiser stop by to check a possible break-in.
Sascha had brought some hard hats up with him---more for verisimilitude than for safety---and he and Jonathan worked rapidly and silently, running the steel cable end to end and attaching it to the pole. Where had they gotten this stuff? "We’ve had it lying around the offices for years," Sascha had said casually. I found this hard to believe. I knew that his moral standards forbade stealing things outright, although "beating the system," like hacking, was a different story. But how much did you have to beat the system to acquire a mile of fiber?
Frick stepped out of the truck. I hadn’t seen her since she arrived, and I almost started laughing. She was dressed in a complete NYNEX workman’s uniform, down to clipboard and tool belt, all fit to her size.
"Where did you get that?"
"I do have friends," she said haughtily. "And I’m not a cultural elitist, so not all of them went to MIT."
The moon had already shifted a little in the sky, and Sascha and Jonathan had only snaked fiber and ballast across Mass. Ave. They were, by their own calculations, about a fifth done, and they had to move faster. The late-night cars driving down the street had not been pleased with us, either. "Where’s your fuckin’ police detail?" somebody had shouted at us. Good question: How about getting Catfood dressed in a little police uniform and have him wave cars past us? Better yet, how about Drexler, with his big beard and Bride-of-Frankenstein two-tone hair? Some covertly acquired police uniforms might make this night seem even more like a scene in a college caper movie than it did already.
We were moving into Area 4, where the old Greek Revival houses were in disrepair and glass shards covered the narrow one-way streets, when I saw the fearsome police car light a few blocks away. There was no way we could page our backups in time.
"Police!" I growled into the walkie-talkie.
Sascha ferociously punched the alert code into his cell phone. I was sure it was in vain; the people doing the 911 spoof would never be able to act in time.
"Duck!" he shouted.
Catfood, Drexler, Ian, and I dashed between some darkened houses. I crouched underneath a window, in the middle of a little flower bed that had beer bottles and potato chip wrappers scattered across it. I saw the headlights moving relentlessly towards us. I bent my head and thought up a couple of words that resembled a prayer. I wasn’t sure who I was petitioning, though. The Goddess, maybe?
The cop car slowed to a crawl. I lifted my head and watched. Sascha and Jonathan suddenly looked tough and official. Jonathan had tucked his hair in his hat and was holding some authoritative-looking tools. The brightness of the streetlights obscured their faces.
"Didn’t hear that you guys were out tonight." shouted the police officer in the passenger seat.
"Busted cable," explained Jonathan, in a loud, blue-collar voice. "Kids throwing too many Air Jordans over the line, if you know what I mean. We’ll be getting complaints from the tenants’ organizations if we don’t fix it ASAP."
"OK," the cop said doubtfully. "Holler if you need a detail."
Jonathan saluted them. "Thanks. Don’t stay up too late, Officers."
The policemen laughed and drove away.
After we didn’t hear the car anymore, we crawled out of our hiding places.
"They’ll be back, you know," said Sascha into his walkie-talkie. "This was a stupid fucking mistake. I don’t know how we’re going to be able to get the job done." His voice deteriorated into an angry whine.
"It’s impractical to leave the cable up," said Ian. "I always thought this was a brain-damaged hack just to feed your ego, Sascha, but now we’re stuck with it. So deal."
Ian was right, but we only had an hour and twenty minutes before public transportation started running. So they sped up the whole process as much as they could. This was clearly a crack team that had been working together for years, down to the way Catfood balanced balletically atop a collapsible 25-foot ladder in order to catch the cable and fiber as it came across. Adrenaline-fired Techies working under duress are a beautiful thing to watch, although preferably if you’re an outside observer.
I was pretty much the only person on the ground by now, with the exception of the uniformed Frick sitting with her arms folded at the wheel of the NYNEX truck. My isolation made me nervous. I got to change coordinates about every 20 minutes or so, but in the interim, I was a woman standing on a street corner in a bad neighborhood in the middle of the night. A couple groups of gangland kids had walked past me, but either weren’t interested in harassing me or just thought I was part of the phone company team despite my ponytail and cutoffs. Maybe it was the walkie-talkie or something.
The impossibly early sunrise was sliding over the glass buildings on the other side of the Charles. We had just reached the far side of Broadway---less than 50 feet left to cover before we made it into our own offices---when a particularly nightmarish thing happened: we ran out of fiber.
The truck and the cherry picker were shortly going to be missed by their owners. It looked as if we would have to sneak them back without finishing the job. Frick let Sascha and Jonathan down to street level. They stayed slumped in the basket. Sascha motioned us over. He looked terrible.
"What are we going to do?" he moaned. "A stupid Sascha plan backfires again. We came so close and we’re failing anyway. It’s my fault. Why do I bother? Why do I do anything? Why don’t I just take the stuff back to the NYNEX offices and say I was the only person involved? A little jail time might be good for me. Except that they’d probably make me teach an introductory computer class while I was there."
"Shove the self-pitying dramatics," said Frick evenly. "According to our schedule, you have exactly two minutes to get out of that cherry picker. I don’t find getting arrested a smashing idea, personally."
Right then, a rusty hatchback pulled up next to us. Inside were two men and a woman. By the looks of it, they were MIT grad students who were just now leaving the lab after an all-nighter. The woman was driving, and the two men were sharing an enormous Dunkin’ Donuts commuter mug of coffee.
"Sascha?" they asked, sticking their heads out the window. "Jonathan? Ian? What the hell kind of stunt are you guys trying to pull?"
Drexler looked like he was going to burst into happy tears at the sight of them. Frick and Catfood took this as their cue to leave, and wheeled the truck and the cherry picker back down Broadway to the office from which they had been commandeered.
"Julie, Zwick, DTW, great to see you," murmured Sascha. "We’re trying to string fiber into our building. We’ve spent the night hacking the telephone poles from Casa Deus to here. I miscalculated, and we don’t have any more fiber, or steel tubing to string it through. It was all we owned. Do you---just by chance---have some fiber for a T3 connection? Can you get some for us? Like in the next 15 minutes?"
"Nothing I can’t do for some old hacker buddies," said the guy who called himself DTW. He jumped out of the car and popped open the hatch. Amazingly enough, there was a spool of thick blue cable. "A little God out of the machine for you Deus Exers, huh? We can help right now, right guys? We’re not going anywhere except to bed, anyway." He laughed. "I bet we got this from the same place you did, huh? I won’t tell anyone you scammed such prodigious cable."
"Bless you," Sascha said faintly. He ran into the building while Julie parked the car. "I’ll be right back. I haven’t used the little boys’ room all night."
A couple of minutes later he opened the window to the third-floor Deus Ex offices and tossed something down into DTW’s hands. "Here’s our pull cord," he shouted down. "We need to get this done, fast."
Everyone, including me, helped unroll the fiber from the spool. Ian shimmied up the last telephone pole with one end of the fiber and some kind of electrician’s tools. He polished the ends of the fiber, then spliced them together. Jonathan climbed up to the second-story window and hurled the other end of the fiber, the one with the anchoring weight attached, up to Sascha, who grabbed it neatly and stuck it through a little hole he had just drilled in the metal window casing. Then Sascha, barefoot for better traction, swung himself outside the third-story window and, holding onto it with one hand, attached the fiber to the side of the building next to the phone and cable cords.
He came downstairs to let us in, rubbing his hands together. "We have the best damn connection in the city," he gloated. "Plus, it’s home made. And free."
When Catfood showed up again---he said Frick had gone home to bed---everyone in the office was either raged out on coffee or asleep. I was somewhere in between. I sidled up to Sascha, who was on the floor with his laptop open in front of him, typing a little and rocking back and forth.
"How are you?" I asked.
"I did good, right? People are proud of me? I’m not a failure?"
"If that’s the kind of thing people grade you on, you did great. A-plus."
Sascha touched my face with the back of his hand. "That means a lot to me. I trust your judgment about hacking."
"You shouldn’t. If you weren’t married to me, you’d think I was one of those idiots you insult all the time."
"You? An idiot? Never. When they---I don’t know who ‘they’ is, but they’re coming to get me anyway---throw me out on my ear, you’re going to be all I have left. I might as well be nice to you."
He rested his head on my shoulder and finally dozed off.
Peter Greer was undoubtedly going to find out about this escapade, even if none of us told him. I just wondered how he was going to write it all up.
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