I, Hacker: Chapter 3, Part 3: “Doors Without Keys”

 The first time I connected to ARPANET, it was by accident.  Or that’s what I told myself later. It started as a maintenance test — a routine connectivity check between the COMSAT relays and the external gateway. I was supposed to ping a few registered nodes, log response times, and close the connection. Simple. Uncreative. Safe. But curiosity has a way of whispering louder than orders.
The terminal window blinked open:

> CONNECT GATEWAY NODE.004
> AUTH: ?

I paused, staring at the prompt. The question mark wasn’t a denial. It was an invitation. A door half-open. I typed a test credential — one I’d found in a forgotten configuration file:

 guest
 Password: guest
The cursor hesitated. Then:
> ACCESS GRANTED.
> WELCOME TO DCA NETWORK GATEWAY.
> CONNECTED: ARPANET.NODE.004 (DCA-CENTRAL)

The hum of the mainframe seemed to deepen, as if the room itself were exhaling.  Lines of text scrolled past — host listings, network directories, system banners.

> MIT-MULTICS.
> SRI-KL10.
> BBN-TESTBED.
> NSA-GATEWAY (RESTRICTED).

Each one was a heartbeat, pulsing in phosphor light. I sat there, frozen, feeling the gravity of what I’d just done. This wasn’t the campus mainframe anymore. This was something older, bigger, alive. I could almost hear it breathing through the static. I told myself I was exploring for work. That it was reconnaissance. A systems survey. That’s how it starts for all of us — curiosity dressed as professionalism. I justified it with technical jargon and caffeine. But in truth, I was drunk on the same thing I’d felt when I first connected to that BBS years earlier.

Wonder. Power. The quiet thrill of trespass. Over the next few nights, I mapped the network. I did it methodically — like a cartographer tracing a continent no one else could see. Each node was a city, each link a road. I built my own directory tree in a hidden workspace, labeling connections, logging response times, tracing topologies.

The structure was fascinating: universities, military labs, contractors — all interlinked through primitive routing systems. Every packet that passed through the Army’s communications servers was a breadcrumb, leading me to new places.

At two in the morning, with the building empty and the lights low, I would trace those routes like a diver exploring an unlit cave.

Sometimes, I’d find active users logged in — scientists, engineers, bureaucrats — working late just like me. I’d watch their terminal sessions scroll line by line: equations, data sets, fragments of memos. Always public, never classified. But it didn’t matter. The magic wasn’t in what they said. It was in where I was.

One night, I discovered a directory that didn’t belong — or wasn’t supposed to.

NODE: LANGLEY-GOV-05.

It didn’t respond to standard pings. Didn’t reject them either. Just ignored them, like a door pretending not to exist. So I built a knock. A few harmless packets with altered header sequences — malformed enough to make the system reply out of habit. And reply it did. The screen flickered.

> PING ACKNOWLEDGED.
> USER: UNKNOWN
> TERMINAL: CLASSIFIED

That was all. Just two lines.  But it was enough to make my pulse quicken. I logged it. Named it The Silent Node. Days passed like this. Work by day, exploration by night. The official tasks grew easy, automatic. I debugged code in minutes that took others hours. Walters stopped hovering. He thought I was a model soldier — efficient, compliant, boring. That suited me fine.

At night, the world opened. I began keeping a second notebook, written in small, precise handwriting, documenting every node, every access code, every discovery. The first page read simply:

PROJECT: NOMAD.

Because that’s what I’d become — a traveler between worlds. There were rules I built for myself. Not moral rules — practical ones.

1. Never change anything.
2. Never leave evidence.
3. Never access classified directories.
4. Never log in twice from the same terminal.

Rule #4 saved me once. A week after I found The Silent Node, I returned to explore again. But the gateway didn’t respond. The connection stalled, then spat out a message:

> CONNECTION FLAGGED - DUPLICATE USER ROUTE DETECTED
> ACCESS TERMINATED.

Someone had noticed the first connection. Maybe not me — but the anomaly. For a moment, my stomach turned cold. Then I smiled. If someone was watching, they’d taught me something: this wasn’t an abandoned relic. It was a living network, guarded by unseen hands.

I wanted to meet them. One night, while tracing through a relay node at Stanford Research Institute, I found something I hadn’t seen before. A small message file, barely a kilobyte, tucked inside a public bulletin directory. Its name: “r0bert.msg.” I opened it.

> TO WHOEVER IS OUT THERE:
> YOU ARE NOT AS INVISIBLE AS YOU THINK.
> - R0BERT

Just that. No timestamp, no reply address. For a long time, I stared at it, half expecting another line to appear. Nothing did. I deleted my shell history, closed the session, and sat back in my chair.

Someone else was in the system.
Someone who could see me — or at least sense me.
And they knew how to talk without talking.
For the first time since stepping off that bus months ago, I felt something I hadn’t felt in years.
Not fear.
Not guilt.
Recognition.

Somewhere out there, another mind was watching the same network shadows I was.
And that made the whole machine feel less like a labyrinth — and more like a conversation.