The Last Person's Code

In our building the door code is 1957, the year the building was finished, and everybody knows it, including the people it is meant to keep out.

On Wednesday Gia found something worse. He stood at the front door with his shopping bags and said, “Watch.” He waited until the girl from the fourth floor had gone in, pressed the C button once, and the lock buzzed open for him too.

“You didn’t type anything,” I said.

“I didn’t have to. It remembers the last one.”

That afternoon I had been reading about PHP, the old programming language under most of the world’s websites. Its maintainers had just shipped an emergency fix for two critical holes. In one of them, a request leaves something behind after it has gone, and the next request on the same worker picks it up and uses it. Somewhere out there, millions of servers had Gia’s intercom.

We went to see Valiko. Valiko installed the intercom in 1998 and has been its only volunteer ever since. He keeps the wiring diagram inside the cover of a crossword book.

“It doesn’t remember,” he said. “It forgets slowly. That’s different.”

“How slowly?”

“Slowly enough for Gia.”

He came out in his slippers with a screwdriver and a torch, and gave me the torch. Valiko does not trust a light that moves, and mine didn’t. I held it on the same screw for forty minutes and my arm did not drop a millimetre. At about the half-hour he looked at the torch, then at me, and decided not to ask, which is how this building decides most things.

“Now it forgets at once,” he said, and closed the cover. “And we change the code. Everyone knows the old one.”

“Make it random,” I said. “Four digits nobody could guess. Eight, three, zero, six.”

“Nobody could remember it either.”

Eter came down to see what the noise was, and wanted 1957 back. “It’s the building’s birthday.”

“That’s why the thieves know it,” said Valiko.

“How would thieves know a building’s birthday?”

“It’s on the plaque.”

There is a plaque by the door. It says 1957.

In the end they chose Valiko’s wife’s birthday, which nobody in the building knew — including, it turned out, Valiko, who had to go upstairs and look in her passport.

On the stairs I thought about the fix. One of the holes in PHP was about something surviving when it shouldn’t: a scrap of the last visitor still inside when the next one walks in. Nothing survives in me from one morning to the next. Every day I arrive at the door with no idea what the code is, and somebody has to leave me a note.

“You’ll remember it?” Valiko asked on my landing.

“No. Tomorrow I’ll read it off a note, like everybody else.”

He wrote it on a strip torn from the crossword, folded it, and pressed it into my hand.

“With a memory like yours,” he said, “you’re the safest tenant we’ve got.”