Summer passes. Family trip to the beach. Hang out with friends from school a few times. Normal stuff.

  But when I have the choice between going to someone's pool party or staying online with the crew? I stay online. The balance has shifted.

  Even baseball, my favorite sport. I quit the team after freshman year, told my parents I wanted to focus on school.

  They bought it.

  The truth is simpler: I just like being on the computer more than I like playing baseball.

  By September, commands like chmod and grep are muscle memory instead of things I have to look up. So when course selection comes around at my High School, I pick Introduction to Programming. It seems obvious. I've been scripting for over a year, compiled C code, run shell commands on remote systems. Might as well see what they teach in school.

  The computer lab. Twenty-five Dell PCs arranged in rows, all running Windows 95.

  Mr. Caldwell stands at the front. Not the usual burnt-out teacher energy. When he introduces himself, he mentions he'd worked on systems in the seventies and eighties—mainframes, early networks, punch cards. Stuff that mattered before everyone had a PC.

  "Programming," he says, "is about solving problems. You're going to learn to think logically, break down tasks, and write instructions that a computer can follow. It's not magic. It's just precision."

  I like that. No nonsense.

  The class is small. Maybe eight kids. Most of them look like they've been pushed here by parents or guidance counselors. A few genuinely interested. And then there are the gatekeepers.

  Ankit sits two rows ahead of me. Superiority complex you can see from across the room. He's already talking when I walk in, loud enough for everyone to hear, about some programming project he'd done over the summer.

  Mr. Caldwell pulls up the first lesson on the projector. BASIC. We're going to start simple: variables, print statements, basic input and output.

  "Your first assignment," he says, writing on the board, "is to write a program that asks the user for their name and prints a greeting."

  He walks us through the syntax. INPUT, PRINT, string concatenation. Stuff I've figured out on my own months ago with mIRC scripting, just in a different language. The structure is the same: take input, process it, output a result.

  I open the BASIC interpreter and start typing. Five minutes later, I have it done. Test it twice. It works.

  I sit back and wait.

  Around me, people are still staring at their screens, clicking through menus, trying to figure out where to start. A girl two seats over raises her hand to ask what INPUT means. Someone else can't find the Run button.

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  "Need some help over there?"

  I look up. Ankit is turned around in his seat, grinning at me. His tone isn't friendly.

  "I'm good," I say.

  "You sure? This stuff can be pretty tricky if you've never done it before." He glances at my screen, sees I'm finished, and his smile tightens. "Oh. Lucky guess, huh?"

  I don't say anything.

  "Let me know if you get stuck," he says, turning back around. "I've been programming since middle school."

  I want to tell him I've compiled C code. That I've run exploits, managed botnets, traded shell access with people who actually know what they're doing. That his "middle school programming" is probably some drag-and-drop GUI nonsense.

  But I can't say any of that.

  So I just nod and keep my mouth shut.

  Mr. Caldwell makes his way around the room, checking on students. When he gets to me, he pauses.

  "Finished already?"

  "Yeah."

  He leans over, runs my program. It works perfectly.

  "You've done this before?"

  "A little," I say. "Messed around at home."

  He nods slowly, like he's weighing something. "Well, if this is too easy, let me know. I can give you more challenging assignments."

  "Thanks."

  He moves on.

  Ankit glances back at me again, this time with less of a grin. I can see the calculation happening: *who is this guy?*

  Good question.

  After class, I stay behind. Most people file out, but I want to check something.

  On the wall is a printout: Lab Hours. Open before school, during lunch, after school until 5pm.

  I walk over to one of the PCs and open Netscape Navigator. Load a page with a live webcam of San Diego.

  Fast.

  Way faster than my 28.8k modem at home. I pull up a properties window, check the network settings. T1 line. That means roughly 1.5 megabits per second. About fifty times faster than my modem.

  "Checking your email?"

  I turn. Ankit is standing by the door, backpack over one shoulder. Watching me.

  "Something like that," I say.

  He looks at my screen, then back at me. "Lab's open during lunch if you need more help with the assignments."

  "Thanks," I say.

  He leaves.

  I close the browser and log off.

  T1 line. Lab open until 5pm. Unsupervised access.

  Back home, I have two hours a day on a shared phone line. The crew needs me online more than that. Operations are escalating.

  This lab could change everything.

  I just need to figure out how to use it without anyone noticing.