From Hacking Harvard...

   The car skidded to the right, then veered left, dodging a turbo-charged flamethrower. A hail of gunfire exploded from the alleyway, and the windshield shattered into a storm of glass, but he pushed forward, the tires squealing, and he was almost safe, a smooth getaway, free and clear--when the roadside grenade blew out his tire. The front wheels jerked off the ground, and the car tumbled down an embankment, smashing and crashing its way to the bottom. There was a sickening crunch of metal. And then the car exploded into a ball of fire.
    Eric tossed aside the controller in disgust. It was his third try, and this time he'd lasted only three and a half minutes before getting toasted. Other than his new Wii--which even his brain-dead sister had agreed was "more addictive than crack, not like I've tried it, because I'm not a total skeeze, but you know what I mean"--Eric steered clear of hand-eye coordination games. He stuck to the world of digital role-play, which, as far as he was concerned, took brains, style, finesse--and had a significantly lower humiliation factor. Besides, at least as a dragon slayer, he was doing some good in the world. Okay, maybe not his world, but it still had to count for something that he'd rescued six villages, 237 peasants, four maidens, an orphan, and a deposed prince from rampage, destruction, and certain death. World of Warcraft trained you to fight the good fight, so that when the real fight came to you, you'd be ready. All RoadKill 7 trained you to do, as far as Eric could tell, was pick up hookers and repeatedly drive your car off a cliff. Though he was willing to admit the    possibility that he was playing it wrong.
    "Do you guys need a remedial tutorial on the meaning of 911?" he asked as Max grabbed the controller away. "You really dragged me down here for some kind of PlayStation crisis?"
    "Patience, young Jedi," Max said, leaning closer to the tiny TV in an effort to see whether the fuzzy figure approaching his car was a prostitute or a cop. "All good things come to those I deem worthy."
    Schwarz, who was at his desk, legs kicked up on the nineteenth century wood, the "authentic Harvard chair" (with the gold seal to prove it) digging into his back, looked up from his notebook. "Professor Kempel is giving a lecture on homological algebra and the computability problem at five, so if this is perhaps not that important..."
    "It's important," Max said, eyes still fixed on the screen.
    Schwarz nodded, and turned back to his homework. "Okay."
    Eric threw himself down on the roommate's bed, which had gone unused since the fist week of school, when Schwarz's roommate, one Marsh Preston, of the Upper East Side Prestons ("Maybe you've heard of us?"), had tossed his Ck boxers, Paul Smith shirts, and six jars of Kiehl's moisturizers and bronzers into a Harvard athletics duffel bag and taken off for Canaday Hall, where his high school girlfriend had a single. "I could be at a rally right now," Eric said. "People Against the Encroachment of Civil Equality. PEACE."
    "That's not PEACE, that's PA-ECE," Max said. "And you hate rallies."
    "Fine." Eric sucked in a breath through gritted teeth. "So I could be home playing World of Warcraft. What's the difference? This is still a waste of time."
    "This is a time to cherish," Max chided him. "A time to treasure the moments of your lives with the people who truly--"
    "A time to cut the bullshit," Eric said. "Why are we here?"
    Max hit pause. He stood up and turned to face his friends. "Why are we here? A good question. An excellent question. Why are we here? Are we just marking time?"
    "I am actually trying to understand the decomposition of symplectic manifolds," Schwarz said, pausing to blow his nose on one of the aloe-infused tissues that had just arrived in another baked-goods-free care package from home, "and their relation to Lagrangian barriers and--"
    "We're squandering our God-given talent on lame stunts and schoolboy pranks," Max continued. "It's time to ask ourselves what we want. What we really want. Fame? Fortune?"
    "Speak for yourself," Eric muttered.
    "Or is it something less mundane, more powerful, more meaningful?" Max asked, his voice rising and falling in ecstatic preacher-like swells. "We always say we want to poke holes in the system, deflate the big heads, unseat the tyrants--but what do we do? Nothing."
    Eric hopped off the bed. "It's not nothing," he said. "It's..."
    But what was it?
    More than a joke, maybe, but...how much more? He looked down at his T-shirt, which read: WAR IS A STATE OF MIND--BRAIN DEAD.
    "What we do matters," he insisted. "It's subtle, but it's necessary. We poke holes in the system. Weaken its foundation. Like Borat. Like Michael Moore. Like--"
    "Like children," Max said. "Flooding out school board meetings. Sealing the school shut." He snorted. "Kid stuff. Time is slipping by, and all the while, we've been ignoring the real prize. Our perfect score. Our Everest." He waited expectantly, but this time, there were no interruptions, just two blank stares. "I'll give you a hint, boys and girls. When it's not flipping you off, it's sticking its massive fingers into everything. It's gobbling up everything around it like a chocoholic at a Hershey's convention. It owns us. All of us." More blank looks. Max shook his head. "Here's a hint, geniuses. Without it, Eric wouldn't eat. Schwarz wouldn't graduate. And my father...well, we all know the only thing in life Maxwell Sr. truly loves."
    "You want us to pull a prank on Harvard?" Schwarz asked, in the same tone he'd used in the fifth grade when Max ordered him to climb up on the roof and field-test their homemade parachute.
    "Not a prank, Professor Schwarz," Max replied, with the same mis of confidence and wheedling that had persuaded Schwarz to jump. "A hack. And not just any hack, but the greatest hack we've ever pulled. Our coup de grace. Our magnum opus." He began pacing back and forth. "Who's with me?"