BadManTech

The oldest file in the archive is a feather bed. My grandparents had one—huge, deep, the kind of bed that doesn’t really exist anymore—in a farmhouse in rural Indiana with pastures on both sides and woods out back. And the earliest thing I can remember, the very bottom of the whole stack, is this: crawling under those covers and disappearing.

That bed could swallow a kid whole, and it did. I’d burrow in and hold still. Then Grandpa would come in and ask, in a voice pitched to carry, “What is that lump?” And Grandma would consider the question seriously. “I don’t know. It could be anything.” And the lump would hold perfectly still, vibrating with the effort of not laughing. The most successfully hidden boy in Indiana.

That’s the first memory—not a toy, not a fall, not a fire. Those come later, and there are files on all of them. The first memory is of being small, and warm, and hidden, in the safest place I knew, while two people who loved me pretended not to find me for exactly as long as I wanted to stay lost.

Every operation that follows in this archive—every expedition, every cache, every unauthorized experiment—was run by a kid whose first memory is as a hidden lump in a feather bed.

More field reports declassified soon. —JW

Every operation has an origin. Mine involves a Hot Wheels trike, a red wagon, and a street built on a downgrade.

The trike could slide. Anyone who had one knew that if you pedaled hard and then cranked the handlebars, the back end would swing around like you’re Bo Duke escaping Rosco. After hundreds of slides, I had the maneuver down to a science.

The wagon, I reasoned, was just a bigger trike. The front wheels were somewhat steerable and roughly the same height as the trike’s. In the absence of pedals, the hill would provide the necessary speed.

With supreme confidence, I positioned the wagon at the top of the hill and then climbed aboard. I grinned as the optimal speed was reached for the maneuver. Then I cranked the handle. Quite unexpectedly, the wagon, now bound by a different law of physics, embraced the pavement, and I experienced temporary weightlessness before the forces of gravity took over again.

What I discovered that day was the coefficient of sliding friction—specifically, that rubber wagon wheels do not have a coefficient low enough to steer/drift in any direction, whereas the trike’s plastic wheels drifted because of their low coefficient.

More field reports declassified soon. —Jimmy

By kindergarten, I had begun noticing that adult-supplied data did not always survive verification. Uncle Charlie had already told me that donut centers are poison—hence why they are removed. He seemed like a reliable source at the time, and so I had been leaving a little ring around every donut hole for years. However, the skeptic in me was awakening.

That Christmas, I did not ask for a toy. I asked for a ladder. The logic was sound: if Santa’s sleigh were real, there would be tracks on the roof. Physical evidence. All I needed was access to the inspection site.

I did not get the ladder. Make of that what you will.

The donut hole audit continued.

More field reports declassified soon. —Jimmy

In rural Indiana, a healthy snowfall often resulted in the most glorious of school holidays—a snow day! On one such occasion, I devised a new experiment.

First, understand that I had done my calculations. That winter, the hill had been a working laboratory, and I had studied it: the older kids snow skitching behind anything that moved, somebody riding on a detached car hood while being towed, and kids on their plastic sleds pointing themselves downhill and then bailing off into the snow before the turn at the bottom. That last part struck me as a design flaw, not a maneuver. A plastic sled has no rudder—bailing is its steering.

At this point, I should add that there was a valid reason for bailing before the turn. If you continued straight, you would end up in a frozen creek with rather steep banks. There was, however, a footbridge off to the right that traversed this complication.

I believed that I had one advantage over the plastic sledders. I had a rail sled with runners and a steering bar. It was a proper vehicle with actual controls. I reasoned, with the airtight confidence of a boy who had never yet been wrong, that bailing was for people without better options. I would not bail. I would ride it down, make the 45-degree turn at the bottom, and cross the footbridge like a gentleman. I had run the calculation in my head. The calculation was optimistic.

Once again, I positioned myself at the top of the hill, climbed aboard my chosen vehicle, and launched myself down the hill. The plan had exactly one weakness—the plan itself. Halfway through the turn, the data came in: I am not going to make it. So I made the only command decision available. I cut back hard and initiated an unscheduled flight worthiness test.

I picked my creek entry point, left the bank clean, and stuck the landing in the sense that the landing occurred. Both handles snapped off the sled, but the pilot walked away. The findings were conclusive: the sled was not flight worthy.

Then came the most important phase of the operation: I got the sled home and stashed it before anyone could conduct an inspection.

More field reports declassified soon. —Jimmy

Some of my best days were junkyard days. Dad’s car always needed something, and the junkyard was where you got it. He’d find the donor vehicle and get to work, and here is the part that mattered: he’d let me take parts off myself. Real tools. Real bolts. I was a kid loose in a field of dead machines with wrenches.

I had my assignments, but I also had my own procurement program running on the side. Every glove box held a small light bulb. Every fuse panel was full of fuses. No one else wanted them, and I pulled them like found treasure and stashed them in a bin under my bed—because you never know what you might need for a project.

I didn’t have a project. The parts came first. The project would reveal itself.

That was the whole education, really. Dad could fix anything—everyone said so—and what he taught me was that broken machines are just parts that haven’t been reassigned yet. The difference between junk and inventory is whether somebody bothered to pull it and keep it.

I still stock the bin before I know the build. The bin has never once let me down.

More field reports declassified soon. —Jimmy

We lived in a trailer park next to a grassy path that served as the unofficial dump. People burned their trash there, in a big rocky pit, and one day somebody left theirs burning unattended.

To a first grader, an unattended fire is not a hazard. It's a laboratory.

I had parts of a Hot Wheels trike and a research question: What does plastic do when it melts? Answer: It drips, it strings, and it behaves fascinatingly when applied to dead horseweed. I was deep in the data collection phase. Peer review was not present.

What I failed to monitor was the test perimeter. At some point, I looked up and discovered that I was running multiple uncontrolled burns. My remediation efforts were not working. The fires had scaled past my equipment.

So I executed the most important protocol I knew: I ran and got Mom.

She was maybe 30 feet away, and she was fast—buckets of water, stomping, the whole response package deployed before I'd finished explaining. The fires died. I did not even get in any real trouble, though I can still see something move behind her eyes when this one comes up at family lore sessions.

More field reports declassified soon. —Jimmy

Down the hill and behind the barn at my grandparents' farm, there ran a creek, and the creek was where I did my best work.

I knew that territory like a contractor knows his worksite: where the gooseberries grew, where the raspberries came in, and where the rhubarb stood. I'd work the creek line and come back up the hill with whatever the season was offering and delivered the haul to Grandma.

This was not charity on my part. This was a supply agreement. I provided raw materials; she ran the processing operation. And what an operation it was! Berries and rhubarb went into her kitchen whole and came out the other side as jelly, jars of it, which was then labeled and shelved. The same kitchen also produced homemade ice cream and soap. I brought up the gathered chaos of a creek bank, and Grandma turned it into finished goods. The jars on the shelf were proof that the whole pipeline worked.

And then there was the cookie jar. I want to contrast this operation with my other grandmother's facility, where baked goods were counted, allocated, and defended. (A report on that incident is coming, and I do not emerge from it well.) This grandma's cookie jar ran a different policy entirely: it was always full, and it was always open. No audit. No interrogation. You walked past, you lifted the lid, and you took a cookie. The jar simply restocked itself through some mechanism I never investigated, because some systems you don't question—you just make sure you're inside them.

More field reports declassified soon. —JW

In first grade, I walked to school—a kid-sized commute of a couple of blocks. Mom would walk me partway and then watch from the edge of our block while I covered the last stretch. She believed this constituted supervision, but I understood it to be a surveillance window with a known blind spot. The moment she turned back toward the house, I executed my procedure: an opposite turn away from school and toward the five-and-dime.

On one particular day, I was carrying Campbell's soup labels. The school collected them—labels for points, points for equipment, or something like that—and I had a stack, which was now a liability. A kid window-shopping the five-and-dime with a fistful of soup labels is a kid with evidence of truancy. So I did what any operator with cache experience would do: I stashed the labels in a bush for later recovery, and off I went to conduct my unauthorized retail reconnaissance.

My mother met me coming out of the store. I want the record to reflect her detection rate across this entire archive: the woman missed nothing that mattered for longer than an afternoon.

But here's the part that has genuinely never stopped bothering me: the labels were never recovered. I went back to that spot, more than once, and searched that bush like it owed me money. The labels were simply gone! My first label inventory, cached in an unsecured location, was lost forever to causes unknown.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I have since spent a rather significant portion of my adult life making labels, registering them, check summing them, and storing them where bushes cannot get them. I am not saying these facts are connected. I am saying I have never once lost a label since, and I know exactly which bush to blame.

More field reports declassified soon. —Jimmy

During second grade, the house we lived in had a shed out back, which meant I had a facility. I was out there one afternoon when I decided it was time to wire something up. I had materials. I had ambition. And, critically, I had a power supply, the adapter from my racetrack, which I reasoned was a perfectly legitimate source of electricity for projects beyond its stated mission.

I made my connections. I plugged it in. And the lights went out.

What happened next is a matter of timing. Somewhere in the house, my mother detected the grid failure and was out the door in seconds. I'm telling you, this woman's response time should have been studied. As she covered the gap between the door and the shed, I executed the only protocol I had to save myself: the adapter was unplugged and chucked into the corner, and the investigator was greeted by the innocent face of a child who was simply playing when the universe mysteriously failed.

As Mom checked things out, the evidence sat in the corner, still warm. The case, however, soon went cold.

More field reports declassified soon. —Jimmy