I really wanted to make a “we can’t stay here, this is bat country” reference in this post, but I didn’t want to piss Edwin off and I’m falling a little short.
The first thing I remember was the light.
It wasn’t bright or blinding, like one would expect from the desert sun; it was cool and blue. My head buzzed with questions and the remnants of the previous evening. Where had I gone? What had I done? My memories were clouded by drink, a hodgepodge of flashing lights, ringing bells, and spotty memories of recalling the TCP/IP stack.
I glanced out the window from my hotel bed, then looked at the clock on my phone. 5:30. I sat up, groaned, my head in a funk. I remembered the drinks, the Cisco party – a plate full of spring rolls, sushi, and fried shrimp – and another 3 gin and tonics. Life seemed so good then. Zombie pirates. Free food. Free drinks. A Cisco dogtag swung freely around my neck as I stood up. It had been the five nines of uptime.
And now…system failure. The drunk screen of death.
I went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror, still in my boxers. I felt like a fraud. What did I know? The 7 layers of the OSI model? The difference between star-hub and token ring? RARP? Child’s play. I rinsed my face and shuffled back into the room. I picked up my phone and started looking through SMS logs and my “sent mail” folder. Shit. Resigned to the damage, I cleared them away. Today would be a new day – it was registration day for DEFCON. It was 5:45; I scrambled to find some gym shorts and quietly left the hotel room.
I needed to flush my cache, and there was a drugstore across the street with a wall of sports drinks. Down in the hotel lobby, I snaked my way through the casino floor. Vegas takes its gloves off in the wee hours of the morning. The cheerful dings and dongs of slots, video poker, and auto-roulette screeched a devil’s chorus; the victims still hanging from the limbs of the one-armed bandit. Shaking, drunk, it would only take one more quarter. One more bet. You can look for whatever you want here, but you can’t deny seeing the wasteland. I had a headache. I had to get out. When I did, I found the air outside to be cool and dry. The streets were soulless, empty. I inhaled deeply and walked to the deserted Walgreens. I bought a large bottle of gatorade and a two-pack of asprin before downing it all on the spot. I went back and bought two more large bottles of the stuff. Back in the hotel, I fell back asleep, headache fading, hoping it was just a bad dream.
When I awoke, it was almost time to leave. The headache was back, and my stomach pained. We took a taxi to the faded “North Strip” about a mile away. More wasteland here. The Riviera – or “Riv” – looked like it was on Vegas death row. It had aged beyond its years, and stood out like an antique among the other, newer properties. Our taxi rumbled its way past the Riv and began a descent into the hacker underworld.
Here, underneath the relic from a better past, was the reason we’d come. DEFCON. The lower level doors slid open with a hydraulic hiss and we pushed our way through a seemingly endless crowd of technists on the casino floor. A quick glance at some of the t-shirts, and you knew this wasn’t your standard “Women in Red Hats” party. The “I void warranties” shirt on the lanky kid with the goggles and long hair, the “I <3 My Geek” shirt on a young woman who looked terribly out of place, and the “NINJA” shirt over a 40-pound cheetos belly. It was a pretty impressive mix of people. Young, old, men, more men, young men, the awkward 16-year-old MIT kid, also male, and the occasional girl-next-door in a corset. No, really.
And then, of course, there were the “GOONS.” A Goon at DEFCON is basically an official, something of a cross between a police officer, a malignant dictator, and Dennis Nedry. The Goons wore red shirts which clearly disclosed their position of power, and they loved to yell at people. I don’t really know what it takes to become a Goon, but I imagine the training program consisting of watching THX 1138 and making fart jokes – they were that distinctive. In fact, I imagine you could tell who the Goons were even if they weren’t wearing GOON shirts, because they’d be the only ones wearing Camelbaks and Boonie hats indoors, while sweating as if they were out in the desert sun. Goons are basically like mom and dad leaving the house and saying “while we’re gone, you’re in charge,” except it’s to the little brother with too many legos.
After enduring watching some Goons yell at some unsuspecting plebian, I scoped out the registration line. It wrapped around the back of the hotel, almost swinging outside into the sweltering parking lot. Sam and Charlie, who apparently do not feel the effects of MASSIVE quantities of alcohol as I do, said they wanted to hit the buffet for breakfast. I considered it, still feeling woozy from the night before, before looking at the sign on the wall which finally convinced me.
Yeah, I bet.
So, there I was, at the back of the line, iPhone low on battery, waiting it out. I met a couple of guys in line who were pretty cool – a guy who was in the same shape (mentally) as I was at the time, a lanky, over-energized network engineer, and his cute wife, who had a tattoo on her chest that screamed “hey, look at my chest, there is a tattoo on it.”
The line went by more quickly than I thought. Sam and Charlie, full of powdered eggs and soylent green, met me back up at the front of the line. We were still in a daze, but managed to work our way to the registration desk, where we got our infamous DEFCON badges, marking the beginning of our voyage to the void of the nerd.
Excellent post. You’re probably right about the soylent green…