I Told You, Eli Oxley

Part One, Chapter One

Let's begin with that familiar phrase – no, not once upon a time, but the other one: It all started when . . .

It all started when... #1: I suppose it really all started when our family got our first computer – I was only five or so years old. It was a Tiger PC and it sounded like a chainsaw whenever we turned it on. We had to put pillows over it to drown out the noise.

Despite its faults, I loved fooling around on that thing. We didn't have Windows though; my dad morally objected to it during Microsoft's monopoly days. So we did everything through dos (the command prompt, or terminal). Through this, I became proficient in computer code. By my eighth birthday, I had a greater command of the language of coding than I did of English, which, looking back, probably led to my social awkwardness. I didn't have any friends in elementary and middle school. And when I say I didn't have any friends, I mean it. I'm talking about sitting alone at lunch and no hanging out after school and definitely no spending the night at someone else's house. That changed in high school, though. But I'll get to that in a second. Back to computers.

When my dad noticed my increasing mastery with coding and such, he began teaching me about hacking. He had been some kind of covert hacker for the government (he could never give any real details) for several years before settling into his intelligence analyst position, and thought it would be good to impart some of his knowledge onto me. It wasn't black hat (criminal hacking) or anything. Rather, he brought home old computers to hack into for fun.

And fun it was. Especially when he finally let me do some real-life hacking during the all-night mission he set up for me when I was in sixth grade. He booked me a room on the Chattanooga Choo-Choo, which was the famous train sung about by the Glenn Miller Orchestra (yeah, I don't really know who that is either, but everyone tells me it was a huge hit). The train was parked in the middle of downtown Chattanooga (Chattanooga, Tennessee – the city I'm from) and was repurposed as a hotel, a pretty nice hotel, too. He put me up in one of the train cars-turned Victorian guest room, helped me set up a computer work station, gave me a sheet of typed-up instructions and left. Me. Alone. The night was a blast.

The instructions were pretty scant – I was to complete three related hacks, wipe any evidence that could be traced back to me, and last the night in the hotel room without getting caught. The three hacks were serious, though. Break into the video systems of the Big River Grille, Bijou Theater and the Chattanooga Lookouts stadium, and stream to their feeds the Spongebob Squarepants episode saved on your computer.

The jobs were pretty difficult – it took me a couple of hours just to get into the Lookouts, and once I did, I hacked into their security feeds as well to see the fallout. The night game of minor league baseball kept going, the players oblivious to the cartoon on the giant scoreboard, so I shut down their lighting system. Even though hacking into the security feeds and shutting down their lights weren't in the directions, it was fun watching the confusion on the crowds and players' faces, and the subsequent scrambling of the crews to regain control of their systems. After watching the scene for the duration of the Spongebob episode, I relinquished control back to the proper owners. I then moved on to the Bijou theater (now a hipster rock climbing gym) and hacked all of their screens and played the same episode. I felt kind of bad for ruining the movie-goers' experience . . . for about twelve seconds. As confusion reigned, I moved across the street to the Big River Grille and interrupted the basketball and baseball games on the various TVs behind the bar and surrounding the pool tables.

After I finished, I deleted all my logs as my dad had taught me and shut down the computer. I lay down on the four-poster and attempted to go to sleep, but my mind was still buzzing. I was tempted to keep hacking. I knew I had the power and capability to have as much fun as I wanted, and I gave in to the temptation. But in less than ten minutes after I turned the computer back on, someone pounded on my door. I expected my dad to be on the other side. I was wrong.