I, Hacker: Chapter 2, Part 3: “Catching Fire”

It’s funny how quickly fear turns into confidence.

The first time you cross a line, your hands shake. The second time, you justify it. The third time, you start to wonder why there was ever a line at all.

By the spring semester of ’83, I’d stopped thinking of the university network as a place I visited. It had become something closer to a second home — an invisible city that stretched beneath the physical one. The dorms, the classrooms, the cafeteria — they all had their reflections in the machine: files, permissions, names, commands. Each login was a door. Each directory was a room.
And I had the master keys.

I’d built myself a new set of accounts — four in total — all disguised as forgotten grad students from the previous year. I generated fake shell histories, planted old homework files, even left the occasional half-finished paper to make them look inhabited. They were ghosts with alibis.
With those accounts, I could move freely. Observe without being seen. And I did. Constantly.
I’d log in under a faculty account just to watch what they were working on. Lesson plans. Exam drafts. Department memos. It wasn’t even about cheating; I didn’t care about the grades anymore. It was about access. The feeling of being in the same room as the people who thought they ran the world and realizing you were standing behind them, unseen.

One night — late April, I think — I found a directory belonging to one of the senior professors, a guy named Harkness. He taught Operating Systems, though “taught” is generous. He mostly recycled slides from the previous decade and talked about punch cards like they were still a thing.
Inside his home folder, he had a subdirectory called /notes/1982_archive/. Inside that:
 final_exam_draft.txt. I opened it.
 
Thirty-five questions, half of which were copied directly from the previous year’s test. I stared at them, smiling. Then I did something stupid — or maybe brilliant, depending on how you define either.
I added a question.

36. What happens when the system administrator forgets who really runs the system?
Hint: check your PATH variables.

I saved the file and logged out. No damage. No stolen data. Just a ghostly fingerprint in the code.
I didn’t hear anything about it for weeks. Finals came and went. I half-expected a knock on the door, or an email from IT, but nothing. I passed the classes I still bothered to attend. I failed the rest. My mother called to ask if I was coming home for the summer. I told her I had a “research internship.” She didn’t ask where.

Then, one day in June, while cleaning up my files, I stumbled across a system bulletin. Just a small text message posted to all users from the head of IT.

TO ALL USERS:
There has been an incident involving unauthorized access to faculty directories. The issue has been resolved. Please do not tamper with system scripts or cron jobs. Lab privileges will be temporarily restricted after 10pm.

Resolved.  Sure it was. They hadn’t resolved anything. They’d just noticed the smoke, not the fire. I’d already moved my backdoors, changed my scripts, rotated through new accounts. I could see every move they made, every attempt to fix the system I already controlled.
And that’s when the thrill changed.

It wasn’t about curiosity anymore. It was about power. Some nights, I’d log in just to watch. Faculty typing memos. Admins running maintenance scripts. Grad students writing code. I could see their mistakes in real time, their typos, their backspaces, their sighs hidden in pauses between keystrokes. It was intimate in a way that felt almost indecent — like reading someone’s thoughts through the sound of their typing.

Once, I watched the bursar’s office update financial records. The transaction logs were just numbers, but I could see the entire machine of the university grinding away: money moving, approvals granted, fees assigned. The invisible economy beneath the surface.

I realized something then — a truth that would follow me for the rest of my life: Every system is just people pretending it’s not made of people. And people make mistakes. I started cataloguing vulnerabilities the way a birdwatcher keeps a list of sightings. I found patterns, habits, the same errors repeated by different hands. No one was malicious. Just careless. Lazy. Predictable.
I didn’t tell anyone what I found. Not because I didn’t want to help, but because I didn’t think they deserved help. They’d built the locks, after all. I was just testing the hinges.

I stopped thinking of it as hacking. I started thinking of it as… maintenance. And somewhere in the middle of one of those long, silent nights in the lab, surrounded by the low hum of a dozen terminals, I realized something else: I’d stopped feeling lonely.