Author's note: This is a massive chapter because we had specific plot points we needed to cover and it took 9,000+ words to get there. Shoutout to Eowyn77's Faramir who helped us brainstorm eight years ago all things router-related. The numbers aren't Dewey decimal and our Bostonian proofread the Bronx accent for accuracy, based on offensive things Yankees fans have said over the years.

Chapter 42: Life, the Universe and Everything

While Sharsky was still eyeing his bagel suspiciously, I glared at Sam and Leo, daring them to contradict my assertion. Sam looked a little sheepish and Leo looked annoyed.

Leo humphed and took another swig of his coffee, "I was hoping you wouldn't figure it out."

I glared at him. He didn't want us, his mod gods, knowing he was in close contact with our main competition?

Sam sighed, "Guys, Robowarrior's part of my security team. We stopped at Spread 'Em for a debrief and schmear. And his name's Simmons."

I sat back stunned. "Wait, he's actually legit involved with all," I gestured wildly, "this?"

Leo looked to Sam for permission, and was given a nod, "He was in Egypt." Then he muttered something that sounded like "one man alone, my tight aft."

Sharsky and I shared a Look. OneManAlone! The attitude fit, even if I couldn't picture him on a Rambo poster.

"So he's on the bl…" Sharsky began, but I talked over him "...on your security team. Is there, like, an application or something?"

"And a hell of a background check," Leo confirmed. "FICA and everything."

Sam rolled his eyes. "Don't encourage them, Leo." He kicked back in one of the office chairs. "So how was your Spring Break?"

I saw what he was trying to do, but chose to take the higher road and acquiesce to the change of subject.

Sharsky, apparently deciding the bagel was safe after all, took another bite and then, spoke, while chewing. "It was all fun until Fassbinder and Lisbeth spent four days making googly eyes at each other." Crumbs flew on each word.

I nudged the trashcan closer to him with my foot and then replied defensively, "There were no googly eyes, and she is the one who kissed me."

That brought the conversation up short. Sam and Leo both looked stunned - which I wasn't sure I should be offended at or feel proud.

"Wait, so she made the first move?" Leo finally broke the silence, looking to Sharsky for confirmation.

Sharsky shrugged.

I scowled, "He was semi-conscious after a caffeine crash and wasn't outside with us so he doesn't know squat."

Sharsky actually huffed at that indictment, "Joss saw it all - she told me you were about to go into the room and Lisbeth laid one on you."

It sounded like he didn't know that it had been a peck on the cheek and not a lip-lock. I decided to keep that fact to myself.

Leo snorted. "So you chickened out, but you still got some action. I'm impressed by both your beginners' luck and dumb luck."

"I am a gentleman," I corrected Leo, "Letting her make the first move is allowing for consent, not 'chickening out.'"

In spite of the fact that Leo bawwwwwwked under his breath at that, Sam lifted his travel cup in a toast to my chivalry. "I think we're all missing the point that Fassbinder got kissed by our favorite Borg over Spring Break."

"AND he got shotgun on the way back," Sharsky added. He was still miffed that he was the only one who never got shotgun for the whole trip.

"Yeah, I did." I paused for a second, "That came out a lot more creepy sounding than I meant it to."

Bossman leaned forward with a grin that made his next words seem surprisingly tame: "So, when's the wedding?"

I scowled, "At least a week after we go out for the first time. Why do you even care?"

"Because there's a code now," Sam patiently explained.

I furrowed my brow in confusion, "Why do the a...other people who shall not be named care whether I kissed Lisbeth or not?"

Leo kicked my ankle, "The Bro Code, insensato. You macking on Lisbeth requires a whole new code of conduct."

I moved my foot farther away from him. "I didn't know you even acknowledged the existence of a code, much less followed it."

Leo looked offended, "I follow the hell out of the code. You don't see me hitting on Mikaela, do you?"

Exasperated, I said, "Only because she'd literally hit you if you figuratively tried."

"And because she's devoted to me," Sam added a bit defensively.

"If you say so. I mean, I was the one she told to get into the back seat." Leo leered.

"So, speaking of mysterious cherchez la femme action," I said, "Who the frack is Rae?"

"We're not done with 'Binder and Lisbeth sittin' in a tree," Leo protested.

"Oh yes we are," Sharsky said, taking my side. "Rae and Mikaela skinny-dipping? And why didn't she show up in any of your pics?"

"If your first interest is in seeing what she looks like skinny-dipping, you're never getting to see so much as her left elbow," Sam decided immediately.

"We just want to put a face to the name," I said. "She made up half the quotes from Spring Break and you've never even mentioned her before."

"Because she was a last-minute addition and she's Mikaela's friend," Sam said. "What else is there to know?"

"Height, weight, orientation?" Sharsky asked, leering slightly.

I shoved him. "Or maybe just name, age, location-old school style?"

"None of your business, on any of it." Sam replied, "She's a little camera shy, so she was the one taking all the pictures."

I wasn't buying that and Sam's reluctance to give us more details made me wonder if she had been 'extra security' from Cam's neck of the woods. A guy could dream, anyway.

"Come on, Leo," I goaded him, not daring to let them realize I was suspicious, "How en fuego is this chica? And do we get to meet her?"

"Weren't we just talking about the girlfriend you already have? Eager for another already?" Sam pushed back a little too strongly. I was so totally right.

I waved my hand in surrender. "Fine, fine. Whatever."

"And what about this Joss chick?" Leo asked, wiggling his eyebrows.

"Whoa," Sharsky interjected abruptly. "Joss is no chick. She is a lady."

That made them blink in frank shock. "Well, technically," Sam began, "every girl is…"

"Should we be asking when that wedding is?" Leo added.

"Not even close," I said. "Lisbeth and I 'made googly eyes' and they bounced around A.C. like Tigger on meth."

"So you admit it." Sam observed.

"Beside the point," I said hurriedly.

But Sharsky wasn't about to let it go. "I'm just saying, she's not a 'chick.' She's a techie. With skills. And a surprisingly high tolerance for gummy bears. She's an equal."

Sam rolled his eyes and threw the balled up bag that our bagels came in at his head, "If you don't want to be alone for the rest of your life, you'd better learn that all women are your equals."

...

Classes started back the next morning, heralded with irritable mutterings of Leo complaining he hadn't gotten enough sleep. I trudged to class through a miserable gray drizzle and couldn't even comfort myself with reading the Daily Buzz during a boring lecture on archetypes and the hero's quest - I'd already read Hero with a Thousand Faces, thank you very much, which had much better examples and arguments anyway.

Between my morning classes I pulled up the schedule for the tutoring lab and saw Cami had scheduled me for Tuesday/Thursday/Saturday, meaning I had an empty evening-which would normally be taken up with spinning wild theories about the robots, but that door was shut to us now. Even my modding duties seemed dull-was the entire internet still on vacation?

...

A post-Spring Break malaise seemed to be affecting half of campus, while the other half were suddenly busy bees-working on projects or research or pre-panicking about finals. Lisbeth immediately got buried in a production and barely had time to text, let alone hang out. I told myself that we weren't really going out, and even if we were I didn't own all her time and attention, and it mostly worked, but I was still a little put out.

Though, I thought I had done well hiding my grumpiness until Cami chastised me on Thursday near the end of my shift for being too impatient and nearly making a sophomore cry.

…

"What do you think the chances are of a meteor strike this weekend?" Sharsky asked Friday afternoon.

"As long as it lands on me…" I grumbled. Seriously, it was beginning to feel like there was nothing left to live for. "If we can't do something geeky soon…I'm going to lose my effing mind." The Daily Buzz was my drug of choice and the only substitute was adrenaline for a junkie like me.

"Let's do something crazy," he suggested.

"Dude, having Sam as a roommate is our last connection to them! I'm not doing anything that'll jeopardize that."

"Not that kind of crazy," he said. "I'm talking an epic hack that'll make international headlines."

I'd settle for a trending hashtag. "I'm listening."

He leaned closer and said in a low voice, "Our glorious institute of higher learning is hosting the statewide high school cheer and dance competition this weekend."

"So?" I said, not getting the point.

"So the Jumbotron will be turned on showing jailbait shaking their booties all weekend. Let's hijack it."

I snorted my Red Bull and had to pound on my chest for a good thirty seconds. "We're not upgrading sport championships to full-on porn."

"Naw, nothing like that," Sharsky said dismissively. "Nothing that Joss wouldn't approve of."

I gave him a baffled look. Either Joss was a good influence on him or her Jedi mind trick skills were on par with Obi-Wan Kenobi. "Then…?" I asked.

"I was thinking more along the lines of Space Invaders," Sharsky smiled.

"YES!" That was exactly the sort of distraction I needed.

By 1 a.m., we'd cracked the system. By 2, we'd safeguarded the hack so run-of-the-mill IT lackeys couldn't stop us before we were ready. Then it was just a matter of uploading the game and routing it deviously enough that we could anonymously play it real-time without interference.

The project made waking up before noon on a Saturday worth it. Promptly at 9:15 AM, we turned the Jumbotron into our own personal arcade. After only twenty minutes, we struck gold on local sports news.

Leo's grumbling in Spanish eventually became coherent Spanglish. "Porque me estan moles...Are those girls legal?"

"Focus, dude," I said. "The hotties with the bodies ain't the reason we're watching."

"Dude," Sharsky mimicked me, jerking his head towards the screen. "Focus on what else is going on."

Helpfully, the weekend anchor chirped, "A delightful, if random, alien invasion of this weekend's on-campus event..."

"WHAT?!" Sam shouted from his bedroom, a moment before a loud thud sounded, indicating he had fallen out of bed.

"NOT THAT KIND OF INVASION!" I shouted back. It didn't stop him swearing a blue streak, but he didn't fly into a panic or anything, so I figured, minor harm, no foul.

When, after 45 minutes, it got picked up by ESPN we decided we couldn't top that. We quietly yielded control back to the school's system and extricated ourselves and our code from the scene, leaving no evidence.

Two hours later I got a text from Lizbeth. /Ok, I know that was you./

/Ask me no questions, I'll tell you no lies./ I replied, but it was pretty flattering that she recognized our MO.

As fun as it had been, the high was short-lived. Worse, I found myself with itchy fingers, wanting to hack something else, and my mind kept turning back towards the Buzz. Surely we could get in again.

To stop myself from giving in to temptation, I turned my attention to the next-best thing: Robowarrior's site. He might be on the Buzz, but his own domain was fair game, and maybe we could glean something useful from him indirectly.

By Sunday night, I was behind on homework and wasn't into his site. Still, I didn't give up. In any spare time I could scrounge, I chipped away at his firewall, but by Thursday, I had to admit defeat. It sucked that he'd beaten me. It sucked that I'd been perma-banned from the Buzz. It sucked that I had met actual, living aliens from outer space and would probably never get to ask them all the questions that had been bouncing around in my brain ever since.

Friday night I had a dream about Cam's triplets and Rae. It sucked to wake up from that, too, but it also reminded me that Rae wasn't part of the Daily Buzz. So Sharsky and I could talk about her - speculate to our hearts' content - and not break any contracts as long as we didn't say anything about alien robots.

I started jotting down questions on a sheet of paper, prepping my ammo. On Sunday morning while Sam was sleepily trying to choose between Cap'n Crunch and Frosted Flakes, I loosed my first salvo.

"So, where'd Mikaela and Rae meet?" I chirped, popping the tab of a Red Bull. Sharsky, doing something on his computer, popped his head up to look at me in confusion.

I swear Sam went BSOD for a full minute.

"What?" Alienboy finally responded, empty cereal bowl still held in his hand.

"Rae-your spring break buddy-you said she's a friend of Mikaela's-where'd they meet?"

Sam let out a jaw popping yawn, "Why're you giving me the third degree this early on a Sunday morning?"

I looked at my watch, it was 11:13.

"Not my fault you're not firing on all thrusters when it's nearly noon," I shrugged. "So, where'd they meet?" I would not let him deflect.

Sam rolled his eyes, picking up the Cap'n Crunch box and pouring some into his bowl.

"Her car broke down and got towed to Mikaela's Dad's shop."

"So she has a car!" I said excitedly.

Sam and Sharsky both looked at me like I was insane.

"Yes," Sam said slowly, "just like millions of other Americans."

"Is she American?" I pounced, jumping about 14 questions down my list, but I took what openings I could.

Sam looked at me, exasperated, "I didn't ask for her Social Security number."

Sam put up with my questions for another 15 minutes, giving out completely vague answers and a few "I don't know"s, before huffily taking his backpack, and retreating from the field of battle.

I wrote down what answers I had gotten, scribbled a few more questions after that, and then paused to consider if the answers or non-answers I had already gotten made any other questions redundant.

Sharsky was still looking at me. "So...why the sudden interest in Spring Break Rae again?...You aren't two-timing Lisbeth already, right?"

I rolled my eyes, "Dude, a random chick gets invited along to a Spring Break where it's Sam, Mikaela and Sam's security. You really think she isn't involved?"

The light dawned in his eyes and he looked excited for a moment before his face fell, "But we can't talk about..."

I cut off his sentence, "I re-read the TOS yesterday. Unless or until someone confirms that she is involved, we can safely ask whatever we want or speculate however we want as long as it doesn't violate certain topics."

A grin flashed across his face and he pulled my sheet of questions towards himself.

By Wednesday night Sam had taken to hiding in his room to avoid both Sharsky and me.

...

The weekend hadn't been bad, exactly, just ordinary and that was its own kind of hell. I had done my duty to god and campus on Friday night and covered an extra shift for Josh on Saturday morning so he could go to a cousin's wedding. We were so desperate for excitement that we watched Attack of the Clones and drank Bull every time Anakin tried to flirt, but that just reminded us that even fictional people were having more fun than we were.

Sunday was for sleeping off our caffeine hangover and doing homework, so it wasn't until Monday that we got past the cursory post-movie night garbage run.

Leo was the one to get snippy about it, telling me it was my turn to "do the dishes" when I was printing off my history paper on Sunday night. I'd ignored it, since my GPA was more important than a few paper plates and red SOLO cups.

I finally got around to it on Monday morning. Among the dining debris, I found a manilla envelope - which usually went along with either secret missions or taxes. And April 15 was just around the corner, so I'd probably catch six kinds of hell if this was something that affected Leo's refund.

Luckily, a delicate layer of grease was all that was attaching it to the plate and it only left a weird kind of smudge on the upper right corner.

Unluckily, it was addressed to "The N00bs" and had a string of binary as the return address. So, not Leo's taxes, but... Holy crap. Holy fracking crap.

This probably hadn't budged since "I hate sand" on Friday night, so if this was time-sensitive, we might be screwed.

I was tempted to open it up immediately, but the odds were pretty good that if they had addressed it to more than one N00b, we'd be punished if we didn't do this together. However, I also didn't want to wait long so I texted a 9-1-1 to Sharsky. It took him a few minutes to respond-he actually liked his art history course enough to pay attention-so I set the envelope far away from anything electronic or flammable and cleaned up the rest of the paper plates. I wasn't going to make a run for the dumpsters yet, but I at least put the bags close to the nearest exit.

/Real 911 or you can't find your keys 911?/ Sharsky finally responded.

/Message from command 911/ I texted back.

He texted something that autocorrect changed to something his mother would approve of, then corrected it to the intended profanity.

I figured that the safest thing I could do while waiting was decipher the binary. It was... cryptic.

587.33

659.25

523.25

261.63

392.00

There wasn't any mathematical pattern that I could find. The values didn't fit any coordinate or location system either. Maybe they were Dewey Decimal numbers, but after looking up those topics (spores, advertising and public relations, specific celestial bodies, social theology, and domestic life) as a whole it didn't make much sense. Plus it would be a bit obvious if it were that simple.

Sharsky opened the door with all the caution of a horror movie babysitter expecting to run into an axe murderer in the shadows.

I gave him the run-down on the binary, and Leo came in just as I was wrapping up my different theories.

"You haven't even opened it." Leo said in an exasperated tone.

"Haven't gotten to it yet," I answered. "You left the first clue as the address label."

"It's been three days and you're stuck on the binary?" Leo asked in disbelief. Then he waved a hand dismissively at us as he crossed the room to his bedroom. "Me estas tomando el pelo," he shouted at us as he closed the door.

Since Leo had made such a big deal about opening the letter, I grabbed a plastic knife and sliced open the manilla envelope.

Inside was a map and a message written partially in cut-out newsprint letters pasted to the page. I read it aloud for Sharsky. "Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is designed to be simple for n00bs like you." With that ominous proclamation, it switched to Comic Sans, just to annoy us. "When we give you the go, you have 30 minutes to get us a pizza from Eyes on the Pies on foot. At the stroke of 30 minutes, the pizza is ours and you reboot the Quest. This must be paid for with your own money-no raiding the slush fund! In the event that you succeed, your access to the blog will be restored and you will be given the chance to meet a non-native blogger in a carefully-controlled environment."

"He's yanking our chain," Sharksy grumbled in disgust, throwing the envelope down on the desk. "This is just a way for him to get free pizza off us."

"But what if it isn't?" I countered. "What if it's the real effin' deal?"

"Sam - let's ask him!"

We both bolted across the room and smashed into a locked door.

"If you bust another door, you'll be lucky if April just skins you alive," Leo warned through the door in a gleeful tone.

"SAM!" Sharsky and I both bellowed. There was no answer.

I pulled out my phone and texted him /sam! need to ask a quick question/

/if this is about Rae again, I really am requesting a new dorm assignment/

/not about Rae/

There was a shuffling from the room and Sam poked his head out, headphones around his neck, which explained why he hadn't responded earlier.

"I'm working on my bio homework, make it quick," he said slightly impatiently.

"Is this 'Quest' for real?" I waved the "invitation" in the air.

"The Quest is very real," he assured us.

"Yeah, but you signed off on this, right?"

He grabbed the document and skimmed it, muttering a few random words, then nodded.

"He went easy on you, but yeah. I approve of this." He handed it back

Leo's head popped up in the doorway as well, "I'm hurt that you don't trust me."

"We're mods. It's our job to be paranoid."

"Well, it's real, and I've got homework. Have fun," Sam confirmed. He started to shut the door and then popped his head out again. "But," he said glaring at us "don't do anything illegal." Then he slammed the door in our faces.

"Dude, you know what this means?" I said.

"That we need to order some pizza!"

…

After three mock pizza runs, we found the average time there and back was 34 minutes and 38 seconds. If we were going to get this down to under 30 minutes, we needed to seriously up our game.

"Well," I said, "if we ignore the outlier that was caused by that accident at Main and Jefferson, then the average is 30 minutes 22 seconds."

"So it's tough," Fassbinder agreed, "but doable, if we keep on the speed."

…

Leo was completely and totally Leo about it, though. I cleared my schedule for the entire weekend and even used an 8-pack of Monster to sweeten a shift-swap. By noon on Saturday, Sharsky and I were bouncing off the walls in excitement without even needing chemical help. By noon Sunday, I was beginning to suspect we were being played, but I wasn't going to give Leo the satisfaction of seeing me beg him for the opportunity to buy him a pizza.

A half hour before Eyes on the Pies closed on Sunday night, Sharsky finally cracked and asked him, "Aren't you going to give us the go?"

Leo looked up from his cell phone and hid the screen against his chest. "Paciencia, young grasshopper. Life does not imitate The Amazing Race and you'll go cuando lo digo, cabrones."

…

"Dude! Your pizza run!" Leo shouted, and I came bounding out of bed, throwing off the covers.

"Wha?" I squinted at him.

Sharsky staggered to his feet and then heavily landed back on his bed.

Leo doubled over with laughter, pointing at my alarm clock as he left. It was 7:14 a.m. on the next Friday morning.

"Pizza?" Sharsky said groggily, trying to roll free of his blankets.

"Go back to sleep," I grumbled. "Eyes on the Pies doesn't open until eleven."

Sharsky was sawing logs again within minutes. I knew Leo was doing it to be a jerk, but if it meant getting back on the Buzz, I was actually okay with a little hazing. It sure beat imagining alien digestion in the trunk of a possibly-alien Camaro.

…

There was a kind of sanctity to 4 p.m. on a Friday. It was when we were done with classes and had a chance to breathe and do the caffeine equivalent of carb-loading for the weekend ahead. Even when I had to work a Friday-evening shift, it was usually pretty chill.

Or it would be, were we not as jumpy as gazelles waiting for the "go" for pizza. Only studying and pizza runs counted as responsible weekend activities, so we'd agreed to get all modding out of the way first chance we got. That was a different kind of catharsis, anyway; I could restore order in a chaotic world before feeling like my head would splodey-go-boom over what was going to be on the final.

I had just edited a post with several four-letter words about a lot of government acronyms when the lights shut off. My computer stayed on, so I looked up to find Leo manning the light switch.

"Go."

Sharsky made it to the door before I did, since I forgot about the headset still attached to my USB port.

…

Thirty-seven minutes. The pizza run had taken thirty-seven freaking minutes. We'd called in the order on our way, but the traffic lights were against us.

EVERY. SINGLE. LIGHT.

And you were taking your life in your hands if you crossed against the light this close to campus.

But what really sunk us was the ten-minute wait in line just to pick up our call-in order. Being dinnertime on a Friday, Eyes on the Pies was packed.

"We would have made it," Sharsky muttered as he unlocked our dorm door.

"Too bad, so sad," Leo chimed from his office chair. "Better luck next time - hand over my pizza."

I stoically gave him the box in my hand, reminding myself that, when we did finally get him his pie on time, it would be 100% worth it.

...

The week was full of lasts. People were word-vomiting last papers at the last minute. People were vainly trying to trick the profs into giving the one true answer to the essay question on their least-favorite exams. The on campus room scheduling tool actually crashed with the load of everyone trying to coordinate their study groups.

And Cami had all of the tutoring assistants scheduled every day as a crush of students who had skipped class the entire semester invaded, begging to be taught three months of content in half an hour.

On Friday, I was late leaving the tutoring lab, fifteen minutes after the nominal closing time as I helped the last student with a practice assignment "Write a program that automatically converts English text to Morse code and vice versa."

I was exhausted and had a headache. I needed to actually synthesize all the notes I'd made during the week rather than just letting them go straight from ears to fingertips. I needed a Red Bull and a nap.

When I opened the door, I glimpsed Sharsky's head bent over his keyboard, without headphones and then Leo stepped around the door into my field of vision grinning evilly.

"GO!"

I stared at him in disbelief as Sharsky shot up out of his chair, grabbed his shoes and was halfway to the door before I moved.

Angrily, I threw my bag at Leo's head and started jogging down the hall. Sharsky joined me once he got his shoes on and we pelted down the stairs (much faster than the elevator) and past the Latin chanters in the lobby.

The week had been so busy that we hadn't had time to strategize so we just booked it as fast as we could across campus.

And we still managed to hit every single flipping light red.

And the line was even longer for the pizzas.

And my wallet had been in my backpack that I had thrown at Leo's head and so we had to pay with Sharsky's laundry funds and my supplementary vending machine pocket change.

It took us a miserable 45 minutes.

We got back to the dorm and glumly handed Leo his spoils. He sat down and started munching while looking at us sitting disconsolately and then began laughing.

"Dudes, do you really think you had the bad luck to run into red lights at every intersection two weeks in a row?"

We looked up at him in confusion.

"You know, the security for the city traffic control grid is woefully out of date."

I sputtered incoherently while Sharsky looked like he was about to cry. I finally managed to get out "Sam said 'nothing illegal'!"

Leo snorted, "That applied to you, not me. And didn't do nada that'd get me a mugshot."

"Maybe not," Sharsky said, "but I bet it was dangerous for someone."

"Wouldn't be fun otherwise," Leo asserted.

With that sorted out, I looked around "Wait, where is Alienboy?"

Leo's gleeful face fell a bit and he said, "Sam's been called away for a bit."

...

When I got up Saturday morning, Sharsky was still at his computer, just like when I'd crashed the night before. "Pull an all-nighter?" I asked him as I sent a text to Lisbeth. /Hey, good luck wrapping tonight!/ I hadn't actually had a chance to see the production but I knew tonight was closing night and as such it was a pretty important day.

"We can do it," he answered far too quickly to be safely-caffeinated. "I've got it! I know how we can thwart Leo's control over the traffic lights."

"Great!" I said, pulling up my chair and keeping one hand free to reach for medicinal root beer, just in case.

"So, step one is we gotta get our hands on the Ultimate Password."

"You don't mean…?"

"Access the Cisco routers." He slapped his desk in excitement.

"All the internet traffic for the school goes through those routers. It's not gonna be on a Post-It on somebody's monitor. This guy probably makes a million bucks a year keeping the school's web up and secure. We're talking a real techy boss-battle to get it."

"Yep. With Amelia Silverman."

"Wait, our techy boss-battle is with a girl?" My phone buzzed, indicating an incoming text.

/Thanks! Sorry I've been so busy-what are you doing tomorrow?/ Lisbeth's text read.

"Joss is a girl," he archly reminded me. "And they're women, not girls. Anyway, she's our way in. Those routers are a tank in terms of encryption and run on baseline code. But, and here's the brilliant part, they're also programmable to censor traffic."

/Just planning on studying most of the day./ I replied to Lisbeth.

Grasping where Sharsky was going with this, I said, "So we program it to censor all traffic - crash the web for the entire school and take Leo down with it!"

"Exactly!"

"But how do we get her password?" I asked. "I mean, unless Cam is willing to help us out, we're kind of on our own here and brute force is the stupid way to try."

"We just need to get a key-stroke recorder on her computer."

"Oh, is that all?" I snarked. My phone buzzed again.

/7pm let's go out and do something fun. Meet me at my dorm? Dress casual./

I blinked, was this actually a date? /Sounds great!/

"Go get yourself a breakfast Bull," he said. "You're too slow this morning."

I grumped a bit about it but went and grabbed one out of the mini-fridge. I noticed that my shelf was empty, and it was half-full of Red Bull the night before.

Grumbling even more that he'd raided my stash, I popped it open and returned to my chair next to his desk.

"No, it's perfect," Sharsky said after I had my first swallow. "You're a TA. You've got access to campus software. You could do it. We could write some kind of trojan horse and send it as an update or something to the whole senior administration."

"Alicia Silverstone wouldn't fall for that."

"Bull up," he said, eerily confident in his taurine-induced mania. "It's Amelia Silverman. And when's the last time you questioned the authenticity of an update that came from a verified campus source?"

I blinked to realize he was right. This actually had a chance of working. There was one hitch I could think of, though. "If we get caught, Cami would stuff me piece by piece down the steam vents we slept on in February."

"Dude! So don't get caught!"

The best way to not get caught was to make it as official as possible. I looked at all the campus programs I had installed on my laptop and then burst out laughing. "The Help Desk Ticket software! We can piggyback a trojan horse onto it. They've been overhauling it, so we've been getting weekly updates. No one will suspect a thing!"

I spent the rest of Saturday writing the keystroke recorder, and whenever I took a break, we'd flesh out our plan a little more. Since we were sending the trojan horse to all the senior administration people, that meant we could hack any of their computers anytime.

So of course we would use the computer of our favorite Dean of Students: Miz Nightingale. Using her accounts, we would create a dummy account (name it "Cam Romero," Sharsky suggested) for our nefarious purposes. The keystroke recorder would send everything it collected to Cam's account.

Over lunch, we ironed out how to convince our dear Amelia Silverman to unwittingly give us the password. If we made a decoy brute-force attack on the Cisco servers, she'd log in to stop the attack and - ta da! - the keys to the campus kingdom would be ours.

The rest was almost easy. I could use a campus computer lab to log into the "Cam Romero" account, remote desktop into Dean Nightingale's computer, and from there, remote desktop into Miss Silverman's computer. Then it was a simple matter to tell the routers to censor everything and burn the whole campus network down.

I'm sure I didn't cackle maniacally, no matter what Sharsky claimed.

With all the details worked out, I turned my attention back to studying. We'd need to take the next several days to finish the keystroke recorder, integrate it with the Help Desk software, and debug the hell out of it before launching our trojan horse on Thursday.

...

My alarm went off at exactly 6:25 on Sunday night. Sharsky startled slightly and glanced around so frenetically that he looked like a dog being offered a stick to catch.

"What? Who what? Who where?"

"Settle down, Bull Boy," I soothed, patting him on his slightly-sticky head. "I'm picking Lisbeth up in 35 minutes and I'm not showing up smelling like you."

"Hey!"

"Hey, we haven't stopped for anything but bathroom breaks in a few hours," I pointed out. "Come on. I'll walk you to the showers."

Sharsky trudged after me, sans towel, but I figured that getting him to get near running water was progress. He was muttering about pepperoni in the last stall on the right when I headed back to the room, so I figured he was fine on his own.

Lisbeth had said casual, but Mom had drilled into me that date casual couldn't involve a t-shirt of any kind. I cheated and wore one under the same jacket I'd worn to Atlantic City, but it was a plain grey T instead of something referencing Hyrule.

To my relief, she was equally laid-back in her dress code. Skinny jeans and a sleeveless white shirt with a jacket of her own just in case. It was as opposite to stagehand black as she could go without being ostentatious.

"Nice to see you in something other than black," I grinned; I'd glimpsed her rushing across campus a few times over the last few weeks-always in black. "You know, black is considered a mourning color."

"Not for lighting designers," she responded. "You look nice, too."

"Not too casual?"

"Oh, you'll want something you can sweat bullets in," she informed me. "So I think we're both in the right uniform."

With that cryptic tidbit and a final goodbye to Katie, she closed the door and we fell into step.

"So, how far are we going?" I was wearing sneakers, but she was in lace-up boots that could have doubled as hiking shoes.

"It's an easy walk and it's a nice night," Lisbeth said as we descended the stairs, "so no. We're not taking Moby or any of the public transportation."

"I like this already," I said. "I've been stuck at a computer desk all weekend."

"Which is your natural habitat." Lisbeth teased.

"Your natural habitat is in a black box theater, but you can't survive on improv alone," I said. She gave a little laugh at that.

"Good point. Need to see if the real world is still out there from time to time," she replied.

I picked up my pace to open the door for her as she said, "Thanks. Katie said you were looking pretty intense."

"In the five seconds she saw me tonight?" I asked.

"In the four minutes she spent in line before one of your colleagues called her number Friday." Lisbeth said with a short laugh.

I wondered how many other people had blurred into one whiny, inattentive super-student in my brain.

"Sounds like your week was pretty intense too."

"Yeah," she said. "It was. Some of us were eating and sleeping backstage with how late rehearsals were going."

I sighed and brushed my hand over my head in the cool evening air. I rolled my shoulders and tried to let go of all the stress and anxiety of finals plus Leo the Troll.

"So where are we heading?" I asked.

"I thought we'd stop for a bite to eat at Park Station," Lisbeth said, naming the strip mall where Spread 'em, Wired and a few other restaurants catered to the campus crowd, "and then we'll head on to our final destination-Nicklecade, it's the local arcade and lasertag venue." Lisbeth confessed with a grin.

...

I was in pretty high spirits after lasertag and we had enough tickets for a bunch of candy and something wacky from the prize counter. Lisbeth popped a jawbreaker into her mouth as we were leaving.

"Walk you back to your dorm?" she offered.

I had hoped we could stop for dessert, my treat, but didn't want to overstep if she was ready to go home, "I'd be honored."

I freed one of my hands from the pocket of my jacket and pressed the button to cross going east-incidentally the intersection just next to Eyes on the Pies. The Nicklecade was only half a block away on the cross street from the current bane of my existence.

To my confusion, she simultaneously pressed the button for the other crosswalk. "You're not from around here, are you?" Lisbeth teased.

"I think we established that a while ago," I reminded her. "What's your point?"

"That GPS directions probably told you the most direct way to get from your dorm's parking lot to this intersection."

"And you're saying you've got a better idea as an all-knowing townie?"

"That's right." She grinned.

Within two minutes, we were on a dimly lit trail that ran by one of the town's less-pronounceable rivers. I knew the topographical feature mainly from map references to Riverside Drive and Mill Street, but it had never occurred to me to look for a shortcut anywhere near there.

It was definitely a townie treasure. They had mile markers and little memorial benches with name plaques on them and even bike service stations for anyone who got a flat. But it also had the moon reflected in the slow-moving water and oaks. Someone in a humanities major would have had an easier time romanticizing the whole thing, but I was a little too distracted staring at her hair in the moonlight. Realizing this, I snapped my attention back to the path.

"This is nice," I said lamely.

"It's nice to share it with someone other than the track team and dog-walkers," she agreed. "And you should see it in fall."

That sounded like an invitation, maybe. Her hand brushed mine as we rounded a bend, but she quickly apologized for bumping into me and I had to put off the idea of taking that a possible invitation.

"Of course," Lisbeth added, "I'll have to use normal streets to get my stuff home for the summer."

"Darn," I teased. "I was trying to picture you wheeling all your boxes and blankets on your desk chair and seeing how far you could make it without stopping for another push."

Her laugh was no louder than the river, but a hundred times more rewarding.

"I never know what mental image you'll come up with," Lisbeth said, brushing my hand a little less accidentally this time. "What would you think of a summer vacation One-Line Stand Challenge?"

"Well, we have to defend our title," I said, suddenly glad she couldn't really see my hopeful expression.

"Or make it everyone for themselves," she suggested. "Sharsky will mortify us all, but I think you'd be amazed at what out-of-context mischief I can come up with in a half-empty college town or backstage."

I turned my face so she could see my official reaction. "Challenge accepted."

Three benches and a tire pump later, we found ourselves at the sidewalk on a diagonal from my home sweet home. I stopped short, my jaw slightly agape.

"And this is why you should always trust a townie," Lisbeth proclaimed.

"That's…" I checked my watch. "We just left…"

After I tried a few more consonants, Lisbeth laughed. "Did I actually just blow your mind?"

That was not the context for the line that I was hoping for, but I blurted out nothing but the truth: "Well, yeah."

I should have had a pedometer on to track how much distance she'd shaved off, but in terms of time, she might just have saved our afts. I forced myself to look away from the dorm and glanced over my shoulder to make sure this wasn't a Narnia-type portal. Nope, it was still a perfectly normal-looking footpath off a parking lot I passed every day. It was a frigging miracle, but I had other things on my mind first.

We crossed campus to her dorm and I murmured vague "good luck on finals" encouragement. At Lisbeth's door, I was the one to kiss her cheek this time and she held on with the hug a little longer than in Atlantic City. I waited like a gentleman for the door to completely close, and then I sprinted like I hadn't since high school gym class back to my dorm.

Sharsky barely noticed when I barreled through the door-he was under headphones and typing furiously-but he definitely noticed when I turned off the power to his monitor.

"Hey! That wasn't a save point!"

I turned it back on. "Had to get your attention in a hurry. Save it in the next thirty seconds or I'm cutting you off at the power strip."

I could see his eyebrows inching towards his hairline at what could possibly get me that riled up, but he obediently yanked off his headphones twenty-four seconds later. By that time, I had pulled out our official map and spread it on the nearest available surface.

"This had better be good."

I grabbed a highlighter and circled our dorm several times. I then did the same to the corner by Eyes on the Pies.

"Dude, I was in the zone. What's the emergency?"

And then I highlighted the path.

He didn't immediately catch on, but he came over for a closer look. "We tried Riverside and we have to go two blocks up and three over to make it to where the bridge is and it adds a…"

"THIS isn't Riverside." I capped the highlighter and shoved the map into his hands. "What's between the river and Riverside?"

"A lot of boring backyards, I'm guessing."

Still a little hopped up on romantic adrenaline, I threw my hands up in frustration. "Look closer."

"William O. Douglas Memorial…HOLY CRAP!"

"The William O. Douglas Memorial Trail bypasses almost every light between here and there. There's even a footbridge over the river."

"You sure about that?"

"Do you doubt the Borg?" I challenged.

"Hooooly crap," he repeated. "Do you think we could get there in…"

"Fifteen oh-eight at a leisurely pace," I responded. "Think what we could do if we were actually in a hurry."

"How leisurely?"

"I can't give you a minutes-per-mile pace, but I can tell you we took our time and still beat the pizza average."

His finger traced the trail, then checked the route against our best-timed path "I mean it's a little longer mileage-wise, but without stoplights...I could kiss her."

I didn't mention that I already had.

The next day Leo had a study group in the morning, so Sharsky and I made a trial-run using Lisbeth's shortcut. Even with all the joggers and allowing 10 minutes for wait time in the store, we made it in 28 minutes.

It was the best Monday ever.

...

I had been home from campus a grand total of three minutes when there was a knock on the door. There was no sound of someone trying to break it down, so I decided it was safe to see who was making my pounding headache worse.

Opening the door, the smell of cheese hit me first and I immediately took a deep breath like I'd just escaped being smothered. I then noticed that there was a guy in a Darth Vader Was Framed shirt, holding a pizza box and a receipt.

"Master Fassbinder or Padawan Sharsky?" he drawled.

"Uh…" I wasn't arguing with the designations, but there was a complete lack of context. "Yeah, I'm Master Fassbinder."

Looking slightly relieved that he didn't have to do this more than once, he shoved the box into my hands. "Supreme Chancellor Borg says May the Fourth Be With You."

Okay, now there was some context, but no one had told me that cosplay was an option for pizza night. "Seriously?"

He shrugged and handed over the receipt as proof. "She tipped extra for it? Live long and prosper, dude."

I stopped drooling over the geekiness and the extra marinara sauce that was mentioned on the box long enough to shout back in Ubese.

Then I backed into the room before anyone could bogart our pizza.

Right on cue, Leo arrived with a solid wooden crate under arm, which was marked both "Fragile" and "This Way Up." "This is an unscheduled pie," he announced with a gimme motion. "I'll take it anyway."

I wedged the box against my hip and slapped his hand away. "Keep your stinkin' paws to yourself!"

He held up a finger Han Solo style, but didn't reach for the box again as we both entered the main room. "You're lucky you're not on a run or that'd violate the code of conduct."

"I'm off the clock and this pie is mine."

"Says who?" Sharsky protested, lured from our room by the smell of garlic in the crust.

Coming back to my senses, I beamed. "I stand corrected. Take a look."

He read the receipt over Leo's shoulder. "HEY! I'm a knight at least!" he protested.

"You are headstrong and you have much still to learn about the Living Force," I quoted Qui-Gon Jinn.

"But you are capable," Leo added. "But all pizza on this quest, by agreement, belongs to your overlords."

"Nope," Sharsky crowed unexpectedly while detaching the usual coupons from the top to save for our stash. "The challenge stipulates that it must be retrieved by us on foot and paid for by our own funds. So unless you're saying gift delivery counts for the challenge, it ain't yours."

I patted Leo's slumped shoulders. "We might graciously share," I assured him. "Sharsky, get the nice dishes." Meaning plastic plates instead of paper ones that sort of disintegrated under too much grease.

"Might share? You ungrateful cochinos. Let me have a piece." Leo begged.

"Give us a peek inside the crate and we'll talk numbers."

Leo suddenly flushed and hid it behind his back. "It's from Mikeala. I've seen what she can do with a blow-torch and you'd have to get me a destination date with JLo to get me to pry open Witwicky's NSFW finals care package."

Disappointing, but we weren't going to try breaking into it with the Buzz on the line. "Fine, keep his secrets. Sharsky, dishes."

When he made no move, I snapped the fingers on my free hand. "Padawan, we're not eating it straight out of the box."

He waited until Leo had gone to fetch plates in hopes of being included in dinner plans, then shoved the coupons into my hands. "It's the second miracle of the week," he whispered.

I stared at the top paper and found that he was right: GRADE-SAVER GRAB-AND-GO! THIS WEEK ONLY, GRAB A HOT AND FRESH LARGE PIZZA FOR $5. (Subject to availability. Toppings may vary depending on day. Must present this coupon to redeem offer. Void if copied, prohibited, restricted, or transferred prior to redemption. One coupon per purchase. Cash only. Sales tax additional. Coupon may only be applied to one large pizza of the non-specialty variety.)

I was ready to dance by the end of the first line. Grab-and-go meant no waiting in line and no need to pre-order. It said one per purchase, but there were hundreds of people in the dorms jonesing for a large pepperoni and we could literally rip one of them off for their probably-ignored spare coupons. This little sheet of paper, delivered innocuously by a guy who quoted Spock in a Skywalker shirt, had just guaranteed our success.

"I foresee you will become a great Jedi Knight," I commended him. "I think we can make this pizza run in less than twelve parsecs."

…

A deafening crack had me diving under my desk, but Leo's laughter made me peek tentatively back around the drawers. He was holding a pin and a popped balloon. "GO!"

I glanced at Sharsky and we bolted from the room. We only ran as far as the stairs, though.

I asked Sharsky, "Got the lapel-cam for evidence?"

He proudly pointed at it. "It's been running since 4:30."

Because of course Leo would send us on a pizza run the Friday of finals week. I'd had ten bucks plus the necessary change for tax (plus an extra buck just in case) and two coupons in my pocket since before heading to campus this morning.

It was literally a walk through the park to Eyes on the Pies, and the Bossman timed it wrong because there wasn't even anyone ahead of us. We walked up, dropped the money and coupons in the first worker's hand, grabbed the pizzas from the second, and were on our way back to the dorm in thirty seconds.

We breezed through the dorm door exactly 18 minutes and 12 seconds after the clock started.

Leo guiltily jumped to standing, Sam's wooden box at his feet. "Da hell you doing back?!"

"Here's your pizza," I said, handing it over. I'd tried out different fandom references in my brain, but in the end, I figured it'd be more fun to keep it chill.

"Ain't no way you beat this clock," he said. "I made sure of that." Admission of guilt made, he took the pizza.

"Actually," Sharsky said, turning his monitor around and pulling up the lapel-cam software, "we did, and we've got proof."

"Ver es creer, mentiroso."

He watched the whole thing with the most grouchy expression I'd ever seen on someone who'd just been handed a free pizza.

"Well... we need Sam to adjudicate this one."

A voice behind us said, "I ain't stayin' in this box!"

I turned expecting someone with a New York Yankees t-shirt based on the accent, but no, it was a FREAKING ALIEN ROBOT letting himself out of the box.

"HOLY CRAP!" Sharsky shrieked our new dorm slogan.

"OH MY GOD, THEY'RE TRAVEL SIZED!" I squealed, accidentally channeling my sister Nancy.

"Ya wanna say that ta my optics, buttface?"

I dropped to all fours to be eye-level with him. "Why are your eyes different colors?"

"Where's your homeworld?" Sharsky asked, on his knees next to me.

"What do you turn into?"

With a series of whirrs and clicks, he transformed into a blue remote-control truck.

"That is so effing AWESOME!" I crowed.

"Do you have any cool weapons?" Sharsky asked, poking one of the wheels to see if it'd fire something.

"Why do you have a Bronx accent?"

"Have you ever gone skinny-dipping?" Sharsky had to go and cross that line.

Our hard-earned alien transformed back and glared at us before climbing back into the box, grumbling "Have you, bitch?"

"Wait!" I demanded. "Where are you going?"

His only answer was to pull the lid back into place.

"What's your name?" Sharsky belatedly asked.

"Nunya," the alien in the box answered.

"Is that Elvish?" I asked, baffled.

"Nunya business. Go away, ya fleshling morons."

Leo laughed so hard he snorted.

We kept at it though, sitting next to the box on the floor and trying out different questions in the hopes that eventually he'd take pity on us and respond.

The only silver lining to our slightly disastrous first contact was that Leo chortled his way into his bedroom after a few minutes and opened up his pizza. "CHEESE?" he indignantly shouted. "It's just an effing cheese pizza?"

"You failed to specify!" I said.

"Garbage in, garbage out!" Sharsky cheerfully added.

We turned back to the still silent box and considered it for a moment.

"So..." Sharsky began.

Both our phones pinged simultaneously.

I pulled out my phone and saw I had two emails; the first had the subject "The Daily Buzz credentials and terms of service" and the second "Post notification: Life, The Universe, and Everything."

The New York accented voice came from the box, "Go botha some otha dumba aliens."