Chapter 3

CSU Fullerton, Ca -- May, 1996

“I do not think I can ever thank you properly for arranging this. Never expected this, doc. What did you have to do to get me in?”

“It is quite the inverse, Benny. There were two departments at Caltech and Berkley, both very interested in you. MIT made me a better offer.”

“You will have to explain that to me, sir. Caltech? Damn, I would pay to go there.”

“Not at all. MIT is very much interested in you. They need computational math and computational physics researchers. They know of your work.”

“So I am supposed to choose between these three schools?”

“At this time, I am inclined to believe that there is no choice to be made. Only MIT would allow you to pursue your goals and meet your needs.”

“Why not Caltech or Berkeley?”

“They are ‘exploratory’ engineering schools. Their principle engineering school researchers do not understand economics; that is, with a capital ‘E’. Only MIT would allow, shall we say, certain lateral movements, in your studies and computational models.”

Benny’s thinking at this point was largely influenced by his perceived need to get the heck out of the area, and of his respect and admiration of Dr.Nordstein; that and the influence exerted due to his professor’s alma mater being MIT.

“Then it is MIT, sir. Is it too late to start in the fall semester? What is required for me to get accepted into their post-grad program?”

“Simply show up by August, my boy. Your selection of MIT is good, because I have good friends that have already arranged your registration, and your thesis advisor will be an old friend of mine.”

“Will you and Doctor Wallace need my help in shutting our investment LLC down?”

“Not to worry, my boy. Annette and myself have it well in hand. Your lawyer assures me that the accounts will be fairly and legally dispersed. He also indicated that Eric Swensen will remain in custody for another three to five months.”

“What about Charlotte?”

“Miss Beckman has been served with a court order. As she is now officially withdrawn, her presence on campus will be disallowed.”

“When will Fullerton register my diploma? I submitted my graduation-check request form last month. They are still sitting on it because I am officially a third-year student.”

“Say no more. Annette has a friend at the Office of Registration and Records. How will you get to Cambridge?”

“My truck.”

“Excellent. We will keep you employed through the summer as my lab assistant and TA.”

Boston, Mass -- August 25, 1996

Having grown up in the antiseptic mono-cultural confines of suburban southern Orange County, and the idealized Mediterranean climate of coastal southern California, Benny was not prepared for the ‘oldness’ of Boston, and the four well-defined seasons.

Benny was fascinated by the density and the perceived ‘antiquity’ of the aged city. Late 20th century Boston was a different America, an American people not just of a different financial means, but a people having a touch of the ‘old world’ culture.

He had never seen kids play in the streets. Benny drove slowly through Boston, witnessing a different sense of society, where each community had social centers were along wide sidewalks, in front of awning-draped store-fronts. Each Boston neighborhood was full of their respective distinct sound and smells and activities. There was not the severely-controlled sterile quiet of his Laguna Hills suburban hamlet.

Massachusets Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Ma -- August 26, 1996

It was not difficult to find the main campus of MIT. It was, by design, a profoundly separate community from Cambridge and Boston, both structurally and culturally detached.

Finding a parking spot edging the campus, Benny parked his truck and fed the meter. As Benson Harrison exited his paint-worn truck, the locals took careful notice of the young man. A group of older men debated that he was more likely an employee than a student. As such, the local thuggery was warned away from his vehicle by the burgess elders.

Benny trekked southwest, almost the length of the campus. Ashdown House was not difficult to identify when approaching from the complex’s northeast corner. The Ashdowm complex was buried amid the myriad gaggle of other buildings, within the center of the south half of the MIT campus.

Actually, ‘house’ is a misnomer. The graduate student apartment complex was of an unconventional architecture. When viewed from within the structures, an assortment of five oddly curved and connected buildings was revealed. The apartment buildings were placed around and within two common open areas. Benny supposed that the two areas were intended as a kind of a courtyard, but doubted their utility.

Benny watched a mid-aged male approach along the sidewalk. He adjudged the man’s face to be open for directions.

“Sir, where is the Hulsizer Room?”

“Checking in?”

“Yes.”

“Great. Good to meet you. I am Jerry Windsor.”

“Doctor Windsor? Of the Media Lab?”

“That would be me. And I am addressing whom?”

“Oh, sorry. I am Benson Harrison. Doctor Nordstein told me to look you up.”

“Yes, of course. Henri and myself have discussed, in length, about the young man he would be sending to us. Please, will you follow me to the Hulsizer Room?”

MIT -- September 16, 1996

The coming and going of the boisterous undergraduate female students, created a constant impedance to the local graduate students of Ashdown House, and a strain on three of the House buildings’ infrastructure. Their audible and physical presence had Benny somewhat disturbed after less than a month at MIT. He was further concerned that some of the women considered his bicycle to be community property.

“Mister Arcson? Do you have a few minutes?”

“Benson, is it? Please call me Jerry. What can I do for you?”

“All of these woman, why are undergrads allowed to use our facilities? And they are always trying to steal my bicycle.”

“Just a minute, let me look you up ... I see ... So you have a single apartment, building four, number 5107. Who is your floor sponsor?”

“Don’t know. What’s a floor sponsor? Uh, but my advisor is Doctor Sorenson.”

“Did you not go to orientation?”

“No, sir. The orientation was canceled to help some of those women move in. I never received any vehicle registration forms, and I did not get any room check-off or bike-lock assignment. What’s with that?”

“Ah, yes. So it would appear that you are a member of the group that fell into our administrative black hole. Let me see if ... no, it looks like he is not on the schedule. I will leave him a note to talk to you. As for the young ladies, they are a sorority. The school had no separate undergrad dorm space available at this time due to renovations. So we had to construct temporary dorms in the basement and a section of the bottom floor of building two. They are also allowed to use building four facilities.”

“I know all of that. But I am paying for access that I have not received, and I have caught, twice, women from this sorority riding my bicycle. It made me late to class.”

“Did you talk to the young ladies in question?”

“Yes, sir. She only said that my lock was too easy to pick, so it was my fault.”

Benny’s mind voided when Jerry Arcson’s reply was laughter.

“I see. Welcome to MIT, Mister Harrison. It is part of our culture; our campus life-style.”

“Sir, I am no lawyer, but I’m willing to guess that this is considered theft; actually, we could call it burglary because my property was secured.”

“What is your program, Benson?”

“My program?”

“The subject matter of your studies.”

“Computational Physics.”

“Ah, yes. One of those, I see; one hears that it is quite the new excitement. You are a rare and unexpected bird, indeed.”

“I’m what?”

“Perhaps I shall have Doctor Ingram talk to one of the sorority’s officers.”

“Who’s that?”

“Vernon and Beth Ingram are the resident House Heads. I would also advise you to see your floor officer.”

Benny shrugged at the elder academic’s brush-off of the requested explanation. Ignoring that, he went with the path of least resistance.

“Who is that?”

“My goodness, we have been quite remiss. Come with me.”

Benny concluded that the administrators of the Ashdown House had been more than remiss; they had been wholly incompetent and derelict.

MIT -- October 27, 1996

“Benson, I gotta hand it to you, my man. You’ve not only pissed off the few hot women we have at MIT, but you have earned the disdain of the most mellow professor on campus. Doctor Ingram was really pissed.”

“Not my problem. They stole my bicycle several times, I tracked it to the thief, and put her in jail, or at least she was arrested.”

“Cindy Shackly was the wrong person to bust, man.”

“Why? She is not innocent. She admitted it. Her group had been warned. And you told me that I could not keep my bike in my apartment.”

“Man, you need to understand a few things about MIT campus culture.”

“I understand that the school has a code of conduct and each department has published an ethical standard.”

“Look, man. It’s, like, uh, like communal, man. picking locks and getting into stuff is a way of...”

“It’s the way of criminal conduct. You people are crazy if you believe it’s okay to be a thief.”

The ways and behaviors and cultural norms of MIT made Benny think that he was in an old and socialized European community, as explained in his undergraduate studies at Fullerton.

Benny’s personal reference had never considered that private property shall be shared with the community. In Benny’s ethical and moral sense of normality, per his previous life in Laguna Hills, there was no accounting for an ill-permissioned ‘sharing’ of private property.

MIT -- November 24, 1996

Autumn came fast in the northeastern states. The sharp climate change was, yet another, unexpected aspect of life at MIT. The increasingly cool mornings became a personal challenge to Benny. He forced himself into the cold, into the sharp dampness of rain, and then into an early light, but bitter snowfall. He had been determined to not allow this unexpected New England version of academic society to steal his morning runs.

The next-most favored portion of Benny’s morning routine was the shower followed by twenty to thirty minutes of reading sci-fi ‘trash’. He was currently working his way through the ‘Beowulf’s Children’ novel. He had waited several years for the sequel to precursor novel ‘Legacy of Heorot’. The routine of run-shower-read had been the only constant to Benny’s life in the preceding three years of his young life.

“Hello Benson. Do you run every day?”

“Yes.”

Benny regarded the undergrad with suspicion. He was in suspect that the young woman was after something, although what it was remained indeterminate. Helene Silva-Devanne frequently scheduled his TA office-hour time, although she had no need of his physics or chemistry or mathematical tutelage. The woman was not particularly challenged by the vaunted rigor of MIT.

Benny turned, moving to the stairwell, hoping to avoid interaction with the dangerously attractive Helene Silva-Devanne and her fascinating eastern European accent. Benny believed her manner of speech to be contrived, but the issue had no standing in his mind, other than that it was a form of deceit.

“What will you do today, Benson?”

Benson stepped into the stairwell, with Helen following.

“Study.”

“Anything else?”

Benson, annoyed with the woman’s persistence, turned with a look of disinterest.

“Why? My actions will not affect you.”

As Benny’s terse reply escaped his lips, his neighbor passed behind the woman, making an incredulous face at him, then continued past them, entering the stairwell.

“I wanted to know if you will go with us to Jessie’s.”

“No.”

Benny continued up the stairs, wondering what it was that the woman really wanted. He stopped at the fourth floor, pausing to enter the passageway, clearing his thoughts before he entered into the mild pandemonium that passed for weekend life in the post-graduate apartment dorms.

“Man, what is your problem?”

“I do not understand.”

“Do you know who that girl is?”

“Yes.”

“Then what is your problem? She was asking you out.”

“I know what she was doing. What is your point, Harry?”

“She is drop-dead beautiful. She is super smart. And Helen has more millions than I have birthdays.”

“I am aware of that. What is your point?”

“My point is that you are the smartest idiot that I have ever known. I give up, Benny. I really do. Wanna get a sandwich at the Landing later?.”

“Call me after eleven.”

Harry Spoons was the only human connection that Benny had made in the previous three months. Benny found him to be ‘real’. He did not soak up academia ‘airs’ as other doctoral students did. He remained ‘real’. Benny respected that, regardless of his studies in his adjudged pseudo-science of capital economics.

Phoenix Landing, Boston, Ma

“ ... but you said that would no longer apply to current models. Why?”

“Look, man. Classical political economy theory was not wrong, at least for the 19th century. Ya really think that Malthus saw this stuff coming?”

“Don’t know. You tell me. That was my original question.”

“Ya gonna eat them fries?”

“No. You are avoiding the question, Harry.”

“I am gonna guess that, since you are up to your butt in it, that you can’t see it. Think about it, man. A market economy is supposed to be self-regulating, where the exchange is determined by production, and the production; ya know, the Invisible Hand and all of that crap. Guess what happened the Phillip curve in the eighties.”

“Are you going to devolve back into another Reaganomics lecture? ... And take the fries.”

“No, but you make an important reference. Remember all of those weirdo discontinuous partial derivatives you helped me with? Guess what? That’s my crux. Where the rate goes...”

“Hello, Benson. May I join yourself and Harold?”

Benny did not answer the woman. But Harry did.

“Hey, Helene. You and your friend, please have a chair.”

Benny frowned towards his friend at his easy invite of the two young females, one of which he had categorized as a pest.

“Like I was saying, man, there is no more well-defined cross-over. There will be no definable equilibrium point in future models.”

“So you are saying supply and demand will no longer determine price and quantity? Harry I think you just made argument that made your whole field invalid.”

“No, man. It just made Smith and Malthus more past-tense. Think about it, Benny. Look at what spreadsheets are doing to accounting, but accountants won’t go away. I remember what you said about forward referencing versus natural order calculations, and I read your paper on algorithmic trading. And when you demonstrated embedded externals to Excel using VBA, my thesis advisor totally flipped, man.”

Helene quickly interjected at the pause in the conversation.

“Benson, did you know that your tutorial on VBA is part of the economics and accountancy courses?”

Benny, jerked out of Harry’s verbal treatise, looked over at the two young woman. Noticing that the second woman was an unknown, he abruptly posited a terse query.

“Who are you? Why are you here?”

“I’m Doris. I am with Helene.”

“I see. Harry, I will leave. Bye.”

“Hold up, man. Just wait a few. It will probably rain or snow soon.”

“It will not precipitate for another hour. I looked at the dew-point lapse rate. Bye.”

Benny dropped a five on the table before making a hasty exit. It was obvious that the eastern European woman was proving to be a persistent distraction, and may have been following him. The question returned to his troubled mind, what did this person want?

As Benny made his tactical retreat, Helen’s friend provided a sarcastic question.

“I’m guessing that is the MIT charm you were speaking of?”