The Annihilation of Foreverland by Tony Bertauski

finger. “And remember, these tablets are not allowed out of this room. The repercussions of such an infraction will be severe.”
    Ass = grass.
    When he dropped his hand, Danny was the first one to the box. He found a seat next to one of the Sleeping Beauties. The tablet felt warm in his hand. It fit nicely.
    The teacher got stern with the rest of the boys barely making an effort.
    “We’ll be here all day,” he said. “Until you finish, I swear to God.”
    Every second in the class was a second away from the game room. They began breaking down into small groups. Even woke up the sleepers. The teacher advised them on how to begin. Danny, though, stroked the smooth glass as instincts bubbled inside him. He ignored the instructions and, with all the excited chaos, called up a virtual keyboard on the touchscreen.
    His fingers raced over the keys with the tablet snuggly cradled in his left hand. He swiftly hit a combination of keys to override the operating system. The screen went black. A cursor blinked in the upper left corner. He began typing again.
    The commands came from somewhere deep in his subconscious. He didn’t stop to think about the letters or the meaning of what he was writing, he just let it flow through his fingertips until line after line of code began scrolling rapidly from top to bottom. He was looking for a combination of words that would give him an encrypted password. He didn’t know what it was, just trusted he’d know it when he saw it.
    AW34uT!69fEW&8990.
    There it is.
    He tapped the glass and stopped the word flow, then dragged his fingertip over the password and dropped it into the upper right corner. The screen went black again. One second. Two. Three.
    And then color swirled into focus.
    A light blinked in the upper right. He had hacked into the network. That blinking light meant he had access to the Internet. To the world outside.
    Danny began to download a browser from an FTP site that popped into memory—
    “Aw, what?”
    Every single tablet went blank.
    Danny looked up. The class was moaning, some of them trying to shake their tablet back to life. “What happened?” someone whined.
    “Class! Class!” The teacher held up his hands. “I need you to hand the tablets back to me in an orderly fashion…”
    Danny quickly slipped into the middle of the room and exchanged his tablet with one of many abandoned on a desk. Then he switched with another one, careful no one was watching.
    “Class, please!” The old man cleared his throat. “Please! It’s important you give me your tablet so we don’t lose your data. Line up, keep orderly, please. Keep orderly.”
    Danny did what everyone else did and began moaning. He told the guy next to him about the idea he had for a lemonade stand. When he was checked off and dismissed, he left the classroom smiling.
    We’re not alone. There is an outside world .

14
    They had a match in the game room in an hour.
    It had only been a week since Danny woke from his first round and he’d put them firmly in first place. In fact, they were so far ahead they would still be in first after the second round. Sid didn’t even pretend to be running the crew anymore. When they talked about strategy, he got everyone quiet and then looked at Danny.
    They were in the cafeteria, talking about the second round only days away. Most had met new girls in the first round and Sid was having a hard time getting them to agree on another match once they were inside the needle.
    Danny pushed his tray away and checked out of the conversation. He looked around for Reed. He had to come back to eat but maybe he did it at night when everyone was sleeping.
    Danny pulled a sheet of paper from his back pocket. He had continued the doodling he started in economics class and fleshed out the details of the girl’s hair, added plump lips and eyebrows. He hoped to see her again once he was inside. Danny didn’t know what he was supposed to do and craved some direction. Craved some