- The windows of the Green Building flicker in your peripheral vision. You can't
  tell if it was the lights turning off, or something falling from the roof.

- You drift asleep on Saferide. The same gaggle of Asian women in shiny dresses
  and heels gets on and off at each stop. There's a solitary girl from Random in
  the back, leaning against the window. You hear someone throw up. The wheelchair
  contraption in the rear rattles loudly. You hear glass shatter. The lights of
  the Harvard Bridge roll past.

- Someone's practicing with glowing poi in the courtyard. The rainy night turns
  the lights into a whirling blur of red and blue. The music sounds like a siren.

- The roof of the Stata Center leaks continually, even when it's not raining. They
  use some of the water to flush the toilets. The rest spills down onto the
  sidewalks and into storm drains. You suspect the drains connect directly back to
  the roof.

- Your parents call. They're driving into town. They want to take a photo in The
  Alchemist. There's an endless line of parents and tourists waiting to take
  photos in The Alchemist. A convoy of Korean tour buses waits eternally along
  Mass Ave.

- A passing duck tour points out the buses. The Koreans wave back and take photos.
  The tourists are themselves attractions for other tourists.

- You swear the trees move around when you aren't looking, especially the ones
  near the course 20 buildings.

- There's a bike locked to a lamppost, surrounded by flowers. It's painted white
  and seems to be melting into the ground. In the morning a Hubway station has
  sprouted in its place.

- There was a video showing the Great Dome opening up and swarms of drones flying
  out of it. That was CGI, right? Some nights you aren't sure.

- There's a scale model of Building 7 outside Steam Cafe. Somewhere inside it,
  there's a scale model of you, and a scale model of the model. If the course 4
  students have fractal armies of homunculi helping them, maybe they won't have to
  work so hard.

- Some days, there's a car in your reserved parking spot. A few times, it was a
  police car; once, an Airgas truck. Every once in a while, the spot just isn't
  there at all. The other spaces are unchanged, but occupied by unfamiliar cars
  whose makes and models you don't recognize. You sigh and pull around to another
  lot.

- Residential Life starts offering a new dining plan, in which you are paid money
  in exchange for agreeing to be dined on. Residential Life doesn't specify what
  will be doing the dining. It does note that freshmen are tastiest, and will be
  paid the most.

- People rush past you in small knots, clutching phones and laptops and chattering
  excitedly about minute details of the hallways. You assume it's a Mystery Hunt
  thing. It's probably a Mystery Hunt thing.

- The SIPB office is out of staples, but it never runs out of staplers. Wanking
  spontaneously generates staplers, as well as useless cables and bottles of
  juice. SIPB sells the juice to ESP in exchange for fresh souls, which they keep
  in an applesauce jar.

- You look up an advanced course 8 class and discover that its units are listed as
  20/4/-12. Past students have rated it as taking more than 168 hours a week. When
  you try to add it to your schedule, your Athena workstation crashes. You should
  probably be taking jlab instead.

- The class shows up on your registration anyway. It's listed not as Listener, but
  as Taster. You do notice a distinct flavor in your Anna's burrito that evening.
  You can't really place it, but it makes you think of dark matter, or maybe
  quarks.

- A cluster printer is producing reams of color printouts, covered in patterns
  that hurt your eyes to look at. No one else is around. You thought Pharos was
  supposed to keep this kind of thing from happening, but the touchscreen tells
  you the print job is owned by Pharos itself. Later, when you leave, the
  printer's trays are empty and its display shows PAPER JAM, but the pages are
  still coming out. They flutter to the floor in a heap.

- The Milk arrives on campus for orientation. All the other frosh take it in
  stride, because this must be what MIT is like, right? No one would say the Milk
  doesn't belong.

- After an all-nighter on campus, you try to make your way home through the
  basements, but after a few wrong turns you no longer recognize where you are.
  The GetFit maps on the walls continue to appear every so often, but they're
  marked with letters that aren't from any alphabet you know. There's a continuous
  slow breeze at your back, and it smells of cinnamon and ozone.

- You see a door labeled "DANGER: Keep Door Shut" standing propped open. It seems
  to compel you to walk through it. You emerge into a secret courtyard you didn't
  know existed. It's wonderful here, under the predawn sky, but you know you can't
  stay.

- Under building 36 you come across a LARPer trapped in a temporal prison. His
  frozen mouth seems to be forming a word, but you can't make it out. The next
  time you pass by, someone has carted the prison outside and tossed it into a
  dumpster.

- Dorm security has been upgraded and now requires a spectral identity holomatrix
  from all visitors, although no one can tell you where you might procure one.
  Despite the policies, deskworkers continue to let visitors in, but the process
  visibly wears them out, draining their vital energy, until they leave at the end
  of their shifts stooped and hobbling. A fragment of the self is required in
  payment for passage, and if the guest cannot provide it, an equivalent must be
  given by another.