I, Hacker: Chapter 3, Part 2: “The Code Room”

 “Welcome to the nerve center of the free world,” Sergeant Walters said, deadpan, as we walked through the double doors.

 The room was long and rectangular, every surface beige or steel. Rows of metal desks sat in perfect lines, each with a humming terminal and a soldier hunched behind it, faces lit green by phosphor glow. The air was thick with the smell of ozone, machine oil, and weak coffee. Somewhere behind the walls, the mainframes exhaled in rhythmic bursts — a mechanical heartbeat. This was the Code Room, the Army’s idea of digital sophistication.

“You’ll work from this terminal,” Walters said, tapping a desk with a clipboard.

“Your first task is to go through legacy message-handling code, clean up the syntax, and make sure it compiles under ADA. We have systems running half a dozen languages — LISP, COBOL, whatever was fashionable before I could shave. We’re consolidating.”

I nodded. “Yes, Sergeant.”

He dropped a binder the size of a dictionary on my desk. “Learn the syntax. No creative liberties. The machines are not your canvas, Private. They’re your orders.”

He walked away, boots echoing off the tile. The Army was terrible at programming, which, in hindsight, made perfect sense. The military ran on command structures and absolutes. Computers ran on precision and logic. The overlap between those two philosophies was narrower than a transistor.

The code I inherited was a disaster — recursive functions with no exit conditions, memory leaks like sieves, comments written by people who either didn’t understand what they’d built or didn’t want anyone else to. Half of the ADA programs had been patched with LISP macros; the other half were missing entire libraries.

The first time I compiled one of the communications relays, the screen filled with red text like a crime scene report. I stared at it, hands poised over the keyboard, and smiled. They’d handed me a living, breathing catastrophe. And I loved it.

Days fell into rhythm. Breakfast. Work. Lunch. More work. Sleep. Repeat. The rhythm wasn’t unpleasant — just endless, predictable, and quiet. I liked the quiet. I liked the feeling of command over chaos. The machines didn’t yell, didn’t threaten, didn’t judge. They just waited for instructions.

Sometimes I’d watch the data traffic in real time — encrypted messages pulsing through the lines. Orders. Reports. Command sequences. All the chatter of a giant, invisible army. The world’s secrets reduced to glowing characters moving faster than anyone could read them.

My job was to keep it running. To make sure the channels stayed open.
But that wasn’t enough. The night shift was my favorite. By midnight, the Code Room emptied out. The fluorescent lights hummed overhead, the only sound besides the steady whir of cooling fans. I’d sit there with a cup of instant coffee, watching the logs scroll, thinking about how much trust these people placed in the invisible.

Everything — command, coordination, intelligence — all of it ran on a language most of them couldn’t read. That bothered me. Because the longer I stayed in that room, the clearer it became: no one really understood how the system worked. Not the officers, not the tech sergeants, not the engineers who wrote the specs. They treated it like a vending machine. Input command, get output. If it jammed, call someone like me.

I started cataloging bugs that weren’t in my orders — problems buried so deep no one had noticed them yet. Subroutines that failed silently. Message queues that overflowed under certain conditions. A misaligned encryption handler that could expose entire command channels under the right circumstances.

I documented everything. Not in the official logs — those were for show — but in a notebook I kept folded inside a manila envelope, tucked behind the back panel of my desk. The first page read:

SYSTEM: COMSAT/ADA-LISP HYBRID
NOTES: BUILT WRONG FROM THE GROUND UP.

Sergeant Walters stopped by occasionally to “check progress.” His checks consisted of looking over my shoulder, not understanding a word of what he saw, and nodding sagely.

“You’re efficient,” he said once. “The other guys take three days to fix a compile error. You do it before lunch.”

“I read the comments,” I said.

He grunted. “What comments?”

Exactly. I wasn’t the only one who noticed the cracks. There was a civilian contractor named Raines who handled network maintenance on the older machines — a balding man with nicotine-stained fingers and a dry sense of humor. He caught me one night rerouting test data through a backup terminal.

“Curious type,” he said, watching the screen.

“Just testing latency,” I lied.

“Latency my ass. You’re mapping the system.”

I froze. “Am I in trouble?”

Raines chuckled, lighting another cigarette right under the NO SMOKING sign. “Kid, the Army doesn’t even know half the stuff it’s got connected. If you want to learn, learn. Just don’t break anything I’ll have to fix.”

That was all the permission I needed. Under Raines’ half-hearted mentorship, I started poking deeper into the infrastructure. The communications hub wasn’t isolated — it was part of a sprawling internal network connecting bases, labs, and civilian contractors. Each node had a name, an address, a personality.

I found directories labeled DEFNET, MILNET, and something called ARPANET. That last one caught my eye. The documentation was sparse, half redacted. But I recognized the structure — open protocols, data packets, message relays between research institutions and government agencies. A network built for redundancy, not secrecy. A system older than everything else, but still alive. Still pulsing.

I didn’t try to connect that night. Not yet. I just stared at the terminal listing, watching the line of text:

GATEWAY: ARPANET.NODE.004 :: STATUS: ACTIVE

It sat there, quiet, waiting. Sergeant Walters’ voice echoed faintly from earlier that day: The machines are not your canvas, Private. They’re your orders. He was wrong. The machines were doors.
And I had just found one that didn’t have a key.