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Most people were too busy cramming in the last weeks of fall quarter to do anything else. It was also getting too cold to go outside. At first glance, it was the perfect night to go around campus and dig holes in the ground. Unfortunately, the ground was freezing up, so things were perfect. Wait a second . . . dig holes in the ground?
Over near where the new tennis courts reside, right near the gazebo, somebody was digging a hole in the ground. His tools were a heavy shovel, a pick, a sack of seeds, and a small bag of explosives. This was near the tennis courts, which was an open area so the explosives wouldn't do. Sure, he could go running into the woods if discovered, but his random hole in the ground would be lost. So no boom-booms.
A good rhythm had been developed in the dark. Sling the shovel, push the shovel, twist the shovel, raise the shovel, turn the shovel, sling the shovel, push the shovel... thunk.
Did I hit rock already? The digger thought. He was surprised, since he hadn't gone two feet before striking hard earth. The digging hadn't been too tough, so he doubt he just hit some sudden patch of cold dirt. He dug around the area and found a square region 2.5 feet around that he couldn't break. He started digging around it, and lo and behold, he had found himself a big box.
This calmed his first fears: knocking into some kind of main (electric or gas being the worst possibilities). However, the stuff in the ground is usually well-marked with spray paint and little colored flags. Anybody with half an attention span would know where not to dig. Still, those markers are off sometimes. That's why your ethernet feed gets cut sometimes; a random digger caught it in the middle of the night.
Warmth filled the late autumn air as the box was unearthed from its sleeping chamber. The digger was surprised by this. The box had a life of it's own. Putting his ear up against it, he heard clicking inside. Moving his head around revealed other noises, like a hum. A root dangled into the ground from the box. Wait a second, that looked like an electric extension cord.
"Get the hell away from my computer!" A voice with a thick, Indian accent hollered from over one of the small landscaped hills across from the tennis courts. The digger, startled, dropped the box on the ground and ran for the woods. He was pursued as far as the tree line.
"Don't you fuck with Bhagovati again!" Kan "KK" Kadamasamaniamurinian yelled after him. His attention was quickly diverted back to the computer on the ground. It wasn't in a normal box. No sir, this was in a huge aluminum case. It was meant to work as a huge heat sink. The ground kept the computer cool, even in summer. Or at least that was the theory. It was also watertight. Unfortunately, it was also above ground, which was no good for Kan. Bhagovati was the first computer he tried this with, so the hole wasn't too deep. With a sigh, he got into the pit and started to dig the hole deeper. Nobody was gonna get his Bhagovati when he was done that night.
"Who's Bhagovati?" Paul asked suddenly. KK almost leapt straight out the hole.
"DON'T SCARE ME LIKE THAT, HOLY ARMS OF VISHNU!" KK screamed, and then he hushed them both, though he was the one being loud. Paul was peering down at KK from the surface world.
"I don't want to lose points on attendance or anything, but I had to come out and see why my lab assistant started cursing and ran out the door. Also, Dr. Abadullah left the lab all of a sudden. So we're all stuck and stuff. He said he had to go dig up something . . ."
" . . . Well, you should have gone to lab at the normal time. Nobody told you you had to come in this late at night. I am busy; go away!" Paul is nice guy and all, but perhaps a little too worried about getting in trouble all the time.
"Won't Campus Safety see you if you keep this up?" He asked him. There was a pause to ponder the situation. A man out in a field digging a hole in the middle of the night . . .
"Get that pick and help me dig. I'll tell you afterwards."
Later, they lounged out at Paul's apartment. As a sidenote, Clarissa was there, listening to Bach's "Fantasia and Fugue in G minor." She was more interested in the Fantasia part, which sounds something like "BWAAAAAAHHHH!" Pinky and Thumb kept themselves busy playing the hacked Xbox. The full moon was approaching.
KK explained that a time capsule was basically a computer buried in the ground. It leeched its power inconspicuously from any nearby abandoned outside outlets. The idea kind of took off at MIT once they got the whole campus hooked up for wireless access. One of their lesser pranks involved having a time capsule randomly message faculty with Charlie Brown erotic fan fiction. The idea got thrown up on Slashdot, where it was met with a collective "hmmm" from the world at large. KK got in on the action, built a computer named Bhagovati, and deemed it his very own time capsule. Bhagovati was a mystical underground city guarded by a Naga in "KK's religion" (Hinduism). An appropriate name for a computer buried in the ground.
"Some folks at Princeton managed to use the power main itself, along with an underground backbone. No wireless at all, since they spliced their way into the cable." KK mentioned.
"What ever happened to them?" Paul asked.
"Who knows. I think the got 'nailed' by the NSA. You know, one of those 'either we arrest you and throw your rights away, or you come work for us for $100k a year." KK continued, "Some people have made proof-of-concept time capsules, but they're no fun. A time capsule isn't a time capsule unless it's a secret. So they usually have to spoof an IP address, or otherwise hijack their way onto a network." The conversation was suddenly interrupted when Clarissa blurted, "Paul, are you gonna fuck me or what? I have to be in Rome tomorrow." She was screaming because of the headphones.
"Rome, like Italy?" Paul asked.
"Oh fuck no; Rome, New York. Italians all know my music is shit."
"Um, in just a minute?" Paul nervously said, addressing her "question." He was the kind of wuss that got nauseous just kissing a girl.
"I'm curious about this bag of seeds. Why the hell would he have seeds?" KK asked. He then turned to the living room, and said, "Hey Clarissa, could you come in here?"
"I could cum anywhere." She said, bouncing into the room with an immoral superstar's authority. A proverbial spotlight instantly showed onto her face. All she had to say was "Tada!" and applause would erupt from all bystanders, including the chipmunk watching from the hole in the wall (this was a Riverknoll apartment). Instead, almost like magic, her attention focused on the bag of seeds. She lifted the bag's opening slowly, as if she were afraid it contained a gaping anus.
"They'll grow in November, if the ground's warm. But they'd be all stubby, like Paul's wee-wee."
"Well, the computer would keep the ground warm enough, I imagine. This guy must know what he's doing . . ."
"Do you think?"
"That's crazy, do you think Johnny Pumpkinseed actually exists?"
Rumor has it at guy on a popular RIT fileswapping network started a crazy prank at RIT a few years back (before the network got nailed with the DMCA). His alias was "Johnny Pumpkinseed." Most people thought he was a gimmick, until flowers and crap started growing all over the campus. His crowning achievement came when pumpkins started growing out of the bushes outside the Eastman building. The administration sent out a mass mailing about it, but it was hopeless: most students enjoyed the free vegetables. The strawberry patch growing in a small grove in the woods was a nice touch. The squashes, carrots, and other underground vegetables would grow longer than they should. Most people thought he just had a good green thumb.
All this speculation was fine and dandy, but it didn't explain much of anything. "Well this stuff grows late into the season, right?" Clarissa speculated, "Maybe something's keeping them warm." Something like a computer, one could suppose. Could a computer be hiding under every patch? One part of them didn't care. The other part had to find out. Clarissa was exempt -- all she wanted to do was have some nookie before bed.
"I came over for nookie, and I'm out here doing this???" Clarissa declared roughly half an hour later. They were out in the woods, guided by a small flashlight and the twilight. "It'd be romantic if it weren't motherfucking cold!" They were heading to a strawberry patch growing in a little grove. Most students wouldn't have known about it -- only the joggers and folks in ROTC venture into these parts of the woods. Well, neither KK, Paul, nor Clarissa were involved in either, but managed to pick up on the place anyhow. They stopped when Paul tripped on a squash, and then was pushed over by the person behind him. Odd thing was, he was the last person in the line.
"Oh, terribly sorry there." A voice said in the shadows, "I wasn't expecting you to stop so fast . . ."
"Who the fuck are you?" KK yelled.
"Oh, I work over at resnet. I've been busy hunting down the top 10 bandwidth leechers around here, so I decided to take a walk." The voice responded. This makes no sense; read it again if you didn't realize it. "Without a flashlight?" Paul commented.
"Ooh no, I am a robot ninja." He said, shaking around some binoculars. "I got me some IR goggles from an army/navy surplus site." The kid's tone of voice, affiliation with resnet, and bizarre use of words gave him away to be Timothy. The night-vision goggles just supplemented his craziness.
"Hey guys what are you doing out here at night anyhow?" He asked them, as if he was the one entitled the answer. "Um, we're looking for a computer buried . . ." Paul began.
" . . . we're looking for that strawberry patch." KK interrupted.
"Hmm, computer? With your flashlight? What kind of elite hackers are you? Watch the pro at work." Timothy told them. KK and Paul turned away in disgust. Timothy brought the goggles up to his eyes and started looking around at the ground. He pointed out in the dark to a spot, saying, "It's around there someplace; there's a warm patch over there."
Timothy seemed to be better prepared for this. What wasn't obvious from first looking at him was he was waltzing around with a metal detector, a signal flux detector, and a PDA equipped with a large wireless antennae. The metal detector confirmed the spot where the box was. "Dig here." He said, but then retracted, "Hold on a moment, don't wanna break any wires just yet. I want to see our precious in action before pulling it offline." The signal detector picked up three wires leading away from the box.
"This is more fun than hacking the Gibson any day." Timothy observed. He followed one of the wires up a tree. "There's the antennae!" The other two wires just kept going and going. "This is a slick kiddie right here." he commented, "He's pulling his juice from two sources." He told them they could start digging, but interest suddenly was lost. The nerds there had disqualified Timothy long ago as a nutcase-idiot, so they don't want to have anything to do with his crazy theories. "Well, fine then." he said, jamming a garden rod into the ground. He pointed to the rod, snickered "Hehe, first post," and started to walk away.
"Get the fuck away from my computer!" Came a scream from the woods. A man dressed in black leapt into the path and tackled Timothy.
"Camping fag!" Timothy yelled while clobbering this newcomer with his signal detector. "Shouldn't we do something?" Paul asked, and KK shrugged. He was more interested in watching Timothy get the shit kicked out of him. Clarissa said a few things into her cell phone and then waited with them. The ninja pinned Timothy down and started punching him in the head over and over and over again. He was knocked over with a whack to the chin with the goggles, effectively switching the positions.
"I will now show you secret technique metal detector head shot!" Timothy screamed, raising the metal detector over his head, and bringing it down with the heavens. There was blood in his expression: nobody fucks with the Timothy. This was scary enough -- the gunshots from behind them were even worse. "I'm gonna die I'm gonna die I'm gonna die" KK kept chanting over and over again. Paul just kind of stood there like an idiot, but Clarissa didn't seem to be reacting either. Two pistol-swinging madmen in suits came running up the path: Thumb and Pinky. "Princess, are you OK!" Pinky asked her.
"Make the scary men go away!" She ordered. But Timothy was already gone. Left on the ground was a man dressed up in black. "Dude, that must be Johnny Pumpkinseed!" KK declared to everybody. He wanted to know who it really was. Thumb knelt down beside the guy and lifted off his ski mask. They were surprised to find it was no other than . . . Dr. Abadullah?!
"Yeah, and I would have gotten away with it to, if it weren't for those meddling kids and their technology." He would later comment. Apparently, Dr. Abadullah was dumping time capsules all over the campus in order to get himself a small armada of machines for denial-of-service attacks against US government domains. His attempt at cyber-jihad was thwarted, and he was deported without a trial. Actually, he was just a time capsule enthusiast, and liked to push the technology. However, the government couldn't understand this kind of reasoning, so they assumed he was a terririst [sic] instead.
Sadly,
Bhagovati was discovered two weeks later and taken away. KK was never implicated
since he left no traces on the machine. Even more regrettable was Clarissa
got no nookie before leaving Rochester. She got the flu instead. And such
the RIT legacy gets propagated across the country through crazy computing
and flu viruses.
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