NROTC

Ever since I was a toddler, I have been recruited and trained in the ways of private subcultures.

I don’t know why.

Maybe it’s just what we do as humans, wanting people to share similarities with.

In the first few weeks of my freshman year at Georgia Tech, I met a guy in class who said he had a group of friends he wanted me to meet.

I had little else to do the night he invited me (although I should have kept up more with my studies, I felt confident enough, from my college preparatory classes in high school, to know what the professors were teaching up to about the eighth week of class).

I had already been invited to a fundamentalist Christian organisation on campus and attended my first meeting with them — decent fellows who wanted to have clean fun — so I was willing to continue to accept invitations by strangers to meet whomever they felt I was worthy of their company.

I lived in Smith Residence Hall on campus, just across Techwood Drive from the football stadium and not far from the Navy ROTC building.

The guy from class, David, lived in either Harris or Cloudman Residence Hall — my memory is a little befuddled about exactly which dorm was his.

Suffice it to say it was just north up Techwood Drive.

When I arrived at his dorm room, the door was open and I walked in.

Four guys were seated on the floor around a table.

On the table was a big piece of grid paper, some strange-looking dice and a stack of booklets.

David asked me if I wanted a beer or a Coke. I wanted the beer but not during a weekday.

He reached into a small refrigerator behind me and handed me a bottle of Coke.

“Close the door, if you don’t mind.”

I obliged.

“Have a seat wherever you like.”

I sat on the edge of a bed because there was no space big enough to sit on the floor.

“Guys, this is Lee. Lee, this is Yong-sun Kim…”

I reached out a hand. “Hi.”

Yong-sun bowed his head but did not shake my hand. “Hello.”

“…Floyd Jones…”

Floyd and I waved at each other from across the table.

“…and Henry Witherspoon.”

Henry and I shook hands.

The first thing I noticed: all of us wore glasses.

David explained to me they were setting up a new game of Dungeons & Dragons, called D&D by those who played, and needed a fifth player.

David had talked about D&D with a few guys after class one day and I had acted very curious.

In fact, I was, and listened intently several times to try to pick up the general terminology of the game.

Because I had been invited, the other players assumed I knew how to play. David didn’t tell them I was a complete novice and I thank him to this day for his generosity.

He played the role of dungeon master, or creator of the miniuniverse in which the players would travel, somewhat blindly, on our adventure.

David read the set of rules he had chosen for this game and the characters we were assigned.

My character was a thief who, in this case, worked both for and against the other players, as revealed while the game progressed.

David had invented an initiation ceremony for this event, lighting a candle and having us recite a code of honour we were to follow no matter what…unless he instructed us differently; otherwise, we were to trust that our fellow travelers were obeying the code of honour without question.

He also had a rubber stamp with an insignia of a shield, sword, crossbow and crow that he inked on all our right biceps, as sort of a brotherhood tattoo we should wear as long as we were in the game.

These guys were really into their characters. They memorised their character traits immediately.

I, on the other hand, immediately looked for a way out of the game.

After listening to them talk about their girl problems and not being invited to any of the fraternity rush parties, I realised I was in a group of guys I hadn’t experienced since ninth grade — basically, all of my nerd friends in junior high school.

My high school years I had slowly risen in popularity so that by the time I left high school I no longer identified myself with the then-antisocial label of nerd (nerds are cool now, it appears, what with the actors on “The Big Bang Theory” making a million dollars an episode?!).

I was already considering becoming a pledge at a fraternity on campus, was in the Georgia Tech Yellow Jacket Marching Band and the Navy ROTC Jazz Band so my social calendar was filling up pretty fast.

These guys were talking about playing the first round of this game until two or three in the morning and then getting together every night for the next two weeks in hopes of finishing the whole adventure.

Whoa!

Appearances are deceiving.

David and his friends weren’t really D&D players.

They were, instead, something else entirely.

But D&D was such an intense niche that few people outside the D&D world were interested in what seemed like an extension of adolescence playing with, instead of GI Joe dolls, imaginary characters from the literary world of “The Lord of the Rings.”

In other words, the perfect cover.

I played for three hours, from seven until ten o’clock, until I had volunteered my thief enough times to brave walking around blind corners into the battle ax of orcs or pounding fists of two-headed monsters that by the time we arrived at our first cathedral-sized cavern, I was easily slain by a dragon’s fiery breath.

The guys kept trying to tell me that the typical thief usually hangs back and slithers in behind, stealing jewels or fallen daggers from the other players.

Since I was new, David told them to give me slack, claiming that I was used to playing battle-hardened characters and just wasn’t the thief type.

I saw him in class the next week and asked how it went.

They were only about a third of the way through his map and he thought maybe I could join them again, if I didn’t mind, to play a minor character to help them like the first thief did.

What David didn’t tell me was that the guys had voted and decided to ask me to join their real team.

What was the real team?

I laugh now because the word ‘hacker’ has taken on a whole new meaning than it did then.

They were computer science majors and they had figured out a way to hack the school computer system to sell mainframe timeshare units to local businesses without the school knowing about it.

They had been searching for a front man to approach business owners and knew none of them had the right looks.

But I’m getting ahead of myself again, aren’t I?

I haven’t yet told you about the group that recruited me to blackmail the small businesses to help organised crime (i.e., adult gangs) launder money, either?

Or the governmental agency that saw how my grades were dropping at Georgia Tech and didn’t want to lose me as a valuable resource, since I’d already sworn to protect and defend the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, or some such statement I barely remember saying, recruiting me to play the longterm role as college dropout?

When I left Georgia Tech and resurfaced as an on-campus student again, a few years later, at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, David was sent to be my handler.

He still used a D&D obsession as his cover story.

And it worked.

Do you know how many college dropouts are actually making good money as nodes in a hidden network but can’t spend a dime until after they reach retirement age?

Lucky for me, it’s never been about the money.

I made it clear from the start — to David and all the rest who wanted to hook their claws into me and call me their own.

See, when you work for free, your information is given away.

That’s the way I worked then and the way I work now.

My acquired knowledge is available to the whole world, the whole universe, for that matter, every day for the rest of my life.

Beats twiddling my thumbs waiting to die!