she could run out and join them. After seventeen years in stifling conformist suburbia, she could finally play.
With seven stabs of the Delete key, the woman erased all but the first two letters of the suggested name. “ET,” it said now. Much cooler. She hit Enter.
“Too short.” The grayish-blue dialogue box rejected her. “Try again.”
She thought. This should be easy. Creativity was her strong suit. Harvard was just a mile and a half away, but MIT was arguably the better school—the best private research institution in the world, by many rankings. A serious place for uniquely brilliant people. Yet she had received a D in math her freshman year in high school. And because she was consistently late to school, she had a long list of unexcused absences from first-period physics. Unlike the typical MIT entrant, she wasn’t an expert or genius or prodigy in anything. Especially not anything technical.
Her admissions application essay had gotten her into this place when her grades alone couldn’t. In the essay—two thousand words when the limit was supposed to be five hundred—the young woman had described an abduction by well-meaning aliens. At the end, the aliens offered to make all human beings think and act exactly alike so there would be peace on Earth. To their surprise, the woman refused, preferring individual choice and variety, whatever the consequences. The essay was a thinly veiled plea: Get me out of suburban New Jersey. And so MIT—either by mistake or out of a wicked sense of amusement—had.
Aliens. The woman smiled. Like E.T., but even better.
Without another thought, she typed a-l-i-e-n and hit Enter.
The initial dialogue box disappeared, replaced by a second prompt to create a password.
Okay, Alien, she told herself. Welcome to MIT.
Tie-dyeing and stilt-walking, deep-frying and drilling. Balloon animals. Tire swings. Mud-wrestling matches. DIY cannons, catapults, and trebuchets. All-you-can-watch cartoons or Star Trek episodes. All-you-can-eat burgers, Pop Tarts, or ramen. This was Rush at MIT.
Rush was the right word for it. Ten days before classes started, one thousand freshmen arrived at randomly assigned dorms on campus. Everyone knew not to get too comfortable. In a week, all but a handful would move out again, choosing different permanent housing from among MIT’s fifty-plus student-led living groups. You arrived, you chose, you moved. It was crazy, but that was MIT. Sink or swim.
Alien explored the scene all afternoon and well into the evening. The living groups competed fiercely for recruits, often via spectacular combinations of architecture, engineering, and pyrotechnics. One living group built a spinning amusement park ride from scratch in their courtyard, for example. Another made an LED dance floor. A third set off fireworks. A fourth boasted a steer roast. A fifth offered rapid passage from the top floor to the ground level of their residence via a fire pole instead of the “hassle” of an elevator or stairs.
“Want your hair dyed?” a woman at one of the student living group booths asked her.
Alien nodded emphatically.
“What color?”
“Red and blue.”
Several other freshmen picked red or blue, but not both. Over the next few hours, whenever one of them passed Alien, he or she nodded approvingly, and Alien nodded back.
Soon it was midnight. This was two hours past curfew at home, but Alien, a born night owl, had finally found her natural habitat. If she could help it, she didn’t intend to be asleep before four a.m. the entire semester. What to do now?
She took off her backpack in the student center and consulted the stack of handouts and fliers various living groups had pushed on her from their recruiting booths. There was another frat party, but that was too far. A water polo contest, but that was too cold. A “cruft”-smashing activity—“cruft” being an MIT term for old electronics—but she didn’t quite see the point.
Finally her attention turned to a slip of bright orange paper half the size of an index card, crumpled under everything else in the bottom of her bag. When Alien smoothed out the slip to read it, she found a shorter—and surely more mysterious—invitation than that in any other handout:
“Meet in the East Campus courtyard tonight at midnight for a real tour of MIT.”
It was already at least ten minutes after midnight. If she wanted to know who or what was behind this invitation, she’d have to hurry.
Outside the student center, it was completely dark. Alien retreated briefly back indoors to find her bearings and chart a path to the East Campus courtyard on a campus map. When she pushed the door