The Code Academy

Apple's been making news for something besides its products and record-breaking sales figures lately—the FBI wants it to break into its own devices. We may in fact be at a turning point for the security of consumer electronics. So, today, Motherboard staff writer Jason Koebler presents us with one possible future that might result. -the Ed.

"What's this?" he wondered, tapping the icon with his thumb. The app had just appeared on his iPhone, kind of like that U2 album that one time.

Alan was thumbing through his phone in his painfully brightening Cupertino apartment, and the icon was just sitting there. Weirdly, he'd come to outside his apartment that morning with a blearing headache, dead phone and no real sense of how he got there. He'd planned on going to a hackathon last night, but things must have gotten a little boozy—that would explain the nausea. Thankfully, his Samsung Smartbrew coffee maker had just kicked into action, as it did every morning at 7:15 AM.

Before he'd had a chance to check his texts and photos, he'd gotten distracted by that icon: Code Academy. His head was foggy, but he knew that iOS 14 wasn't expected for another week, and Tim Cook hadn't teased anything about a new default app at last week's keynote, which Alan wouldn't dare miss.

The app's interface was simple, kind of like the welcome screen included in all new Apple products. "Hello Alan," the text read. "Apple's engineers have been impressed with your coding. You have been selected to participate in the Apple Code Academy, where you will learn how to become a top iOS developer. Would you like to continue?"

Obviously.

A popup. "The Apple Code Academy would like to use your current location." OK. The app closed. It was gone; the SmartBrew app took its place.

"Siri, what is the Apple Code Academy?," he shouted at his wall-mounted iScroll (such a waste, his friends said, of the iPad progeny's tactile rollup capabilities).

A Google search popped up. A bunch of nonsense. He checked the Apple subreddit—just more bitching about how there would still be no retina-scan unlocking on iOS14; nothing about Code Academy. Nothing on TechCrunch, nothing on Gizmodo. Nothing on Hacker News. Time for more coff—his phone buzzed. A notification from Apple Taxi, which had replaced Uber as his go-to robotaxi service from the moment it launched last year. Your ride is here. Uh, what ride? He looked out the window, and sure enough, it was there. He was just going to work on a new celebmoji app all day, and that could wait till the afternoon. He walked downstairs and into the gleaming rose gold Apple Car.

The Apple Campus had never been as flashy as Google's—more old-school college quad mixed with office park than a playground. Still, it was Apple, and his heart raced as he saw the street sign—1 Infinite Loop—from the car's window. But the car didn't turn. Instead, it continued another few hundred feet and swung right down a service road and then left into a wide tunnel that seemed to run right underneath the heart of the campus.

The car came to a stop in a large parking garage that was, Alan thought, decidedly un-Apple-like with its harsh fluorescent lighting. He stepped out.

"Hi! We're gonna need your iPhone, your Apple Watch, keys, wallet" a clean-cut man about his age, decked out in the standard royal blue uniform worn by Apple Geniuses said before he could get a word out. "Do you have an iScroll? Not with you? Great. You won't need it. We've been waiting for you." Shrugging, Alan handed over his devices, which the Genius absentmindedly filed into a series of glass cubbyholes behind a barebones desk and led him through a white windowless door.

"Welcome to the Code Academy. Modeled after our stores, of course. You'll spend most of your time in here," the Genius said offhandedly, beckoning to a half dozen long rows of modern-looking wooden tables set with open MacBooks. The cavernous room must have been 50 feet underground, but a thick, tempered glass ceiling allowed the sun to pass through. "Working down here, well—they must have you working on something pretty important."

"Right. So—do I fill out an application? Or-"

"That won't be necessary," the Genius said. "You're all set."

Alan smiled cautiously. "Well I'm glad I just managed to score a studio nearby, housing swap with an old Reddit buddy who just joined Y Combi—"

"And I'm sure it'll be waiting for you when you're done," the Genius said. "You live here now." Alan just gave a quick nod.

They walked into a bedroom labeled "Sequoia." A concrete floor, perfectly white beds, minimalist desks, bright lamps, an array of charging ports.

"Someone will grab you in a bit to tell you about your project," the Genius said. "Can't say I know anything about it, way above my pay grade. Welcome!"

Alan surveyed the room. It seemed oddly familiar—must have been because it was the dormitory equivalent of an iPhone. Clean, bright, impeccably designed. Minimalistic. A shower in the adjacent bathroom had touchscreen sliders on the wall for hot/cold and pressure that would control the jets coming directly from the ceiling. He walked back into the bedroom and noticed an iScroll. At least he'd be able to login to his smart plant waterer and thermostat from down here and check in on the various web forums he moderates.

He grabbed the scroll and rolled it out, anxious to get online. Giving Hacker News a quick once over would calm his racing mind. A full year? Here? Working for Apple was a dream come true, but it would have been nice to have gotten his affairs in order, at least tell that Tinder date he wouldn't be seeing her again. But. No LTE. No wifi.

He was still fruitlessly clicking around when the iScroll got a message: Alan, report to work station "Half Dome." Must have been sent via Bluetooth.

As he walked back into the room the Genius had shown him, he found himself among what must be his fellow recruits. Most were about his age, all looked a bit confused—but excited—as they began to sit down at workstations named after various bits of California nature (Tioga Pass, Redwood, Golden Bear, etc). The stations were lined with bottles of thick, cakey Soylent and smaller vials marked with the Apple logo. He sat down, picked it up, and rotated it. Tiny, neat lettering suggested that these were something called "iDrops."

"Have you tried them yet?" a cheery voice shattered his focus. He looked up, and saw a brunette coder staring back at him. "Coffee replacement. My Genius told me. If I'm Apple I'd have 'em analyze your tears for any irregularities. Makes sense to release them with the retina scanner and integrate it with Apple Health. Hope that's our project! I'm Erika by the way."

"Alan," he said, realizing that his morning coffee had definitely started to wear off. It is pretty bright in here, he thought. He squeezed off a couple drops into bleary eyes and instantly snapped back into the rhythm of the conversation, his headache fading quickly. "So, like, what is this? How did we end up here?"

"Me? Has to be for my world famous games," she said wryly. "Ever heard of Slappy Bird? Kandy Krunch? Worms With Friends? Basically, I take popular games and clone 'em. Helps pay the bills, at least. How about you?"

Alan smiled. Another coder who thrived at the margins of the App Store—they'd get along great.

"I do unofficial celebrity emoji apps," he said "Free—with premium content for any preteens with negligent parents. Harry Styles Stickers, Selena Gomemes, Justin Biebmojis. That kind of thing."

He had a nice rapport with Erika, and they easily fell into a conversation about how to annoy users into paying to disable ads or unlock content. "Smiles, winks, your basics are free, but birthdays and valentines, wel—" Their conversation was interrupted as a serious-looking woman stepped on stage at the front of the room. She clearly ran the joint.

The other coders stared reverently, anxious to hear what she'd have to say. It was like an iPhone release keynote, but there was only 30-or-so of them in the room. Best. Keynote. Ever.

"I am Linda Gibson, Apple Security" she began. "You are all here because we've noticed you have a knack for, let's say, remixing other individuals' code. But let me ask you this: How many premium flashlights does the world need? And Threes knockoffs? One of you even tried to sell Mario. You've all kind of impressed us, in your own way. It is clear you've each got the basics down, but we saw a potential for each and every one of you to take it to the next level. We think with a little practice you can take your skills to the next level, and, lucky for both of us, we've found ourselves in need of people with your particular skillset."

"For the next year, you will be working closely with the FBI to obtain information from the iPhones of suspected criminals," she continued. "This…," her voice seemed pained, "will unfortunately require writing software that will make the iPhone less secure, which is why we have to keep you here. We're hoping your creative interpretation of intellectual property law will serve you well. You might even learn something and, if you've got the chops, we'll transfer the best of you to a more traditional job here at Apple after your stint is up. Sound good?"

It wasn't really what Alan was expecting, but hey, his foot was in the door.

Linda was right. He was pretty good at analyzing and altering other people's code. And it's not like he cared that much about his houseplants anyway. Before he'd gotten here, he'd been coding primarily to try to find a way to catch on at Apple or Google or at least Yahoo. He just didn't think it'd happen this fast. Now he was learning more about iOS's underlying architecture, and he was cautiously optimistic that Apple would keep him around afterwards.

It was hard work. He woke up, squeezed in some iDrops, coded, coded, Soylent and iDrops when his headache came back or the sun got to be too much, coded some more. But, replace the Soylent with In-N-Out, those iDrops with coffee, and some of that coding with obsessing over the latest tech news and, well, it wasn't that much different than his real life. He figured that here he'd eventually get to make the latest tech news—long days were a small price to pay for the privilege.

Hacking into his first iPhone took him two full months of trial and error, sticking a bit of code here or there to see if it'd get rid of a feature in iOS that deletes everything in an encrypted phone if you get the passcode wrong 10 times in a row. Eventually, he cooked up something he thought would work. He wasn't to unlock the phone himself—Linda called over a may-as-well-be faceless Fed who would brute force it. It worked, and his iScroll blinked with the first notifications he'd gotten since he first started working on unlocking the phone.

PHONE UNLOCKED: iPhone 7S. Syd Farhan, suspected member of Islamic State.

WORK ORDER: iPhone 8. Charles Winston, suspected child pornographer.

The Fed held up the phone he'd been working on, flicking through iMessages sent in Arabic.

"You did good," he said, grabbing his MacBook and putting it in a stack with all the others at the end of the day. The coders weren't allowed to go over their code at the end of any session—security protocol. "Start on that next one tomorrow."

He sidled up to his work station the next morning, instinctively squeezed out a few iDrops into his eyes, opened the MacBook's screen, and saw that it was completely empty.

"Uhh, Erika, my code is gone. What the hell?" he said.

"Security, dude. Do you think Apple is stupid?" Erika responded. "You've got to do it over. Again. I've already written this exploit three times. What's taking you so long?"

"Guess I've got some catching up to do," he said sheepishly.

"Leaving any physical copy of the exploit is a vulnerability," she told him.

And so it went. Over and over again. And again. And again. The process was always more or less the same. Write the code, wait for Linda to flag down an FBI agent to come over to extract some iMessages belonging to a drug trafficker, some child pornographer's photos, some correspondence between suspected terrorists. Then the FBI agent would wipe the code, he'd get a new notification on his iScroll, and keep going.

Eventually, he was able to crack a half dozen phones a day, but there was a seemingly neverending supply of phones to replace those he'd backdoored.

WORK ORDER: iPhone 8. Jerry Simpson, suspected Dark Web drug dealer.

PHONE UNLOCKED: iPhone 8. Jerry Simpson, suspected Dark Web drug dealer.

WORK ORDER: iPhone 8S. Kyle Anderson, suspected Black Lives Matter activist.

PHONE UNLOCKED: iPhone 8S. Kyle Anderson, suspected Black Lives Matter activist.

WORK ORDER: iPhone 7S. Laura Enson, suspected lone wolf terrorist.

PHONE UNLOCKED: iPhone 7S. Laura Enson, suspected lone wolf terrorist.

WORK ORDER: iPhone 8. Jenna Erickson, journalist, suspected to have contacted state-sponsored hackers.

He sat there, staring at the notification. What the hell was he doing? Some reporter's iPhone? He stood up, knocking over his chair in the process. He wanted a hit of his vape, maybe even a drag of a real cigarette. That wasn't possible down here—but at least he could walk over to his bedroom for a minute, disappear as best he could for at least a few minutes. He leant down to pick up his chair when he felt Linda's hand on his shoulder.

"Listen," she said. "I'm not supposed to tell you things like this, but you've been one of our best coders. And I want you to know we don't like this any more than you do. It's just, we don't have a choice—don't blame Apple; blame the FBI. Since 2016, we've had to write new code to unlock every iPhone the feds want cracked—we even had to write code for a program to streamline the decryption request delivery system. It feels weird, it feels wrong, but it's the law. It's what we have to do if we want to stay in business. Keep at it, and I can see you having a long, long career here."

Alan just nodded blankly, squeezed out two iDrops, and got back to it.

Wake up. iDrops. Shower. Soylent. iDrops. Decrypt, unlock. Decrypt, unlock. Decrypt, unlock. Soylent. iDrops. Decrypt, unlock. Sleep. He didn't even think about the code he was writing anymore. He'd memorized it—or at least his fingers flitting over the keyboard mindlessly had.

He thought back to—what was it, 10 months ago?—when he'd spend most of his mornings coding a new celebmoji app. Sure, those were all roughly the same, but like, kind of different. He always added some sort of flair to it, a topical meme-moji here, a stupid dress-em-up minigame there. Before he got here, you couldn't drag him away from his computer. Now he wasn't so sure he even wanted to work for Apple when this was done.

In fact, he and Erika seemed to have the same exact idea to check out an IRL FarmVille when they got out of here. It weirded him out how the idea seemed to come to both of them at the same time.

He dreamt about her sometimes. They were always mundane dreams, almost like fuzzy memories. Always sitting at their terminals tapping away, chit chatting idly about switching to Android, about getting out of tech altogether, about wanting to code literally anything else besides an exploit.

He had lost track of the days, with nothing to really differentiate them. And then, one morning, he woke up, looked at his iScroll, and saw a notification. CONGRATULATIONS, YOU HAVE GRADUATED THE CODE ACADEMY. Please report to the Code Academy lobby.

He caught Erika's eye in the line of coders filing out of the door they'd come in one year ago. She smiled at him, and he ambled up to her.

"Are we really getting out of here?," he said. "God I could use a smoke. And some coffee. You in?"

"Oh we will. I've got to roll around MY bed first though and use MY shower and, well, this sounds crazy but I've got some coding I want to get started on. Something original," Erika said, "Tomorrow? Text me," she added, writing a phone number on the back of a Soylent bottle label.

They left one by one. The same Genius who had shown him around a year ago handed him his iPhone, keys, Apple Watch and wallet that he'd originally surrendered.

"This will take you home. We'll be in touch about next steps," he said, gesturing to the Apple Taxi. He stepped inside and pulled out his iPhone. The battery was dead.

"Jesus, couldn't even charge the thing for me," he thought. He stared out the window, watching as Cupertino's office complexes flew past him, wondering what he was supposed to do now. Erika was right—start with a shower and some coffee, take it from there. The car pulled up to his apartment. He went to open the door. Locked.

He glanced at the car's LCD screen: "Blink Twice to Unlock." He did. A flash fired, momentarily dazing him.

He stumbled out of the cab. As he regained his bearings, he found himself wondering how he'd gotten into it in the first place. At least he was at his apartment, he thought, rubbing his head, which was pounding. Very strange. He got out of the car, his head splitting. He pulled his iPhone out of his jeans pocket—he always had his iPhone on him, but it was dead. Must have forgotten to plug it in last night. At the hackathon?

He walked up the stairs to his house, inserted the key into the lock (he'd need to get a smart lock soon, he thought, idly), and turned it. Better plug his phone in.

He reached back into his pocket and felt a scrap of paper, a Soylent label actually. It had the name Erika written on it, as well as a phone number. Wow, had that hackathon gone better than he remembered? Maybe his phone, which was just now turning back on, would have some clues. He picked it up, tossing the label on his nightstand when he noticed a small pile of them had accumulated there. He instinctively flicked through the phone's home screen noticing a new app on his phone: Code Academy.

"What's this?" he wondered, tapping the icon with his thumb.