241 Pizza

The Harvard Connection, as they called it, was a website that was going to change life on campus. The central idea was simple: put Harvard’s social life online, make a site where guys like Tyler and Cameron could meet girls without all the inefficient, time-wasting, wandering around campus that real life usually necessitated. Eligible guys — like them — did not have the opportunity to meet enough choice girls because they were too busy doing the things that made them such hot properties on campus. A website geared toward socialising could fix that problem, could create a fluid environment where girls and guys could meet. But they didn’t have any way in hell of making the site without the help of a real computer genius, someone to write the computer code that would make it work.

MARK was deep in hacker’s paradise. Breaking into Harvard’s computer system was child’s play. His computer was filling up with photos from the college databases: every girl on campus — except the freshmen — all those pretty and not so pretty faces, blondes and brunettes and redheads, big-breasted and small, tall and short. By 4am he had downloaded thousands.

Once he had all the data, he wrote the algorithms, complex mathematical programs. By morning he’d created a website where you compared pictures of undergraduate girls, voted which one was hotter, then watched as it calculated who were the hottest chicks on campus. He was calling it Facemash.com.

He e-mailed it to a few of his friends to see what they thought. Then he headed for one of his classes. On his return, he saw to his surprise that his computer screen was frozen. And then it dawned on him. It was acting as a server for Facemash.com. But that didn’t make any sense, unless — “Holy shit.”

His friends had e-mailed the Facemash link to their own friends and somewhere along the way it had picked up steam of its own. Facemash had gone viral throughout the campus. Someone had sent it to everyone involved with the Institute of Politics, an organisation with more than 100 members. Someone else had forwarded it to Fuerza Latina, the Latina women’s issues organisation. And someone from there had forwarded it to the Association of Black Women at Harvard. It had also gone to the Crimson, the college newspaper. It had been linked to bulletin boards.

In under two hours, the site had logged 22,000 votes; 400 kids had gone onto the site in the past 30 minutes. Shit. This wasn’t good. The link wasn’t supposed to go out like that. He’d wanted to figure out what the legalities were of downloading all those pictures. He had a feeling that he was in big trouble.

DIVYA slammed down the Crimson, sending a sandwich flying. Tyler Winklevoss, who was eating it, glared at him. “Sorry about the sandwich. But look at the headline.”

A website where students were able to rate girls based on their pictures had caused a stir on campus, Divya said. “The kid who made it shut it down himself. When he created the site, he didn’t even realise people were going to get mad.”

“Who got mad?”

“Well, girls. Lots of them. The feminist groups on campus sent dozens of letters. And then the university. So many people were on the site at the same time, it clogged up the university’s bandwidth. Professors couldn’t even get into their e-mail accounts. It got 20,000 hits in 20 minutes. Now the kid who created it is in a lot of trouble. Seems he stole all the pictures off the houses’ databases. Him and a few of his friends are gonna get ad-boarded.”

Tyler knew all about the ad board, the Harvard administration’s disciplinary process. He liked what he was hearing. This kid had screwed up but he was obviously brilliant, maybe what they were looking for.

“We should talk to this kid.”

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