Bounty Hunters

We're coming up on a week since any of us have slept solidly. I'm luckier than most in getting a bed to spend my narrow slice of downtime in. Pizza boxes are stacked next to the trash can, and the trash bag abounds with old hamburger wrappers. I had real pasta last night, but as nothing has arrived for a while everything we eat now has the stale and slightly soggy taste of being wrapped in foil and thrown in the refrigerator for a few hours.

"Jackie," one my teammates calls, "You ready for another run?"

Bounty hunters have found a rebirth in the modern age. We live in a time where open-ended problems abound. Resources just don't exist for the government and various scientific panels to fund each of them individually. Instead, they flash a huge prize purse to the first team to accomplish the feat du jour, and then they sift through the resulting submitted designs to bring back whatever they believe will solve their problems.

The contestants pour in. They are more hacker than scientist; the kind of people who get a little thrill out of an ominous deadline, tremendous challenges and terrible odds. You'll be pressed to find a crowd who takes caffiene more seriously, and you'd be frightened to think of how much money a bunch of kids are chasing. Some years nobody wins at all, and some years everybody exceeds the expectations and it comes down to who does it best.

Oddly enough when I first met my teammates I already knew some of them. This world is frighteningly small, and good men are hard to come by. We know each other, we know our competitors: both friendly and the enemy who would sabatoge or disqualify us in a heartbeat. (And if you believe scientists are better people than to try to do so, you have another think coming.) Oddly enough, I'd say the hacker part of us is the more civilzed part. It's what makes us family.

"Its jamming again, that rake we put on isn't long enough."

"Fuck it, cut up this lacrosse stick and bolt it on the front."

Somebody's always asleep on the couch, despite the clamor of the voices and the roar of the power tools in the same room. There's more McDonald's monopoly pieces on the wall than I'd care to admit. Half of us are sick and we're still working 18 hour days. The undergrads are frantically copying homework off one another during breaks or over cold french fries.

...and yet, right now I wouldn't trade this for the world. I have been here before and I truly believe that this is where the magic happens: somewhere between the duct tape, the JB Weld, and the warm flat soda at 4AM. This truly is how the world changes.

"God damn," a teammate says, running a dremmel through the casing of a drill battery pack, "I hate it when they try to make shit tamper-proof." The stops come clear and 10 new cells pour from the battery. He gathers them up and lays them on the mat with a few other dismembered drill packs and begins wrapping the cells in electrical tape. "Somebody get the crimps."

So I'm sorry that I haven't written a lot recently. This is where I am. We've not many hours to go and many miles ahead to cover. In the meanwhile...

See you space cowboy...