and a small section of the steel wall dematerialized revealing a secure vault filled with raw dataCache files.  Milan reached for one but as he did suddenly and without warning the local grid spun so fast he felt sick again and then there was a flash of blinding dazzling light which morphed into a shape which turned into the study hall window.

“Hey, Stemberg, what do you think you’re doing!?”  Mr. Vuga demanded with gritted teeth as he yanked the eyeVid off of Milan’s face.  Crap!  It had to be him!  Mr. Vuga, the Hejn Secondary Dean of Discipline, was on study hall duty.  Not good.  Mr. Vuga was a dogmatic zealot when it came to the rules, and he sure as hell had no sense of humour.

Milan couldn’t think just yet.  Too much neural-static in his head.  Mr. Vuga’s face was bright and red and greasy and kind of disgusting and just plain weird and, well, totally way too hyper-real, which was normal.  Real always felt too real after SIM.

“Sorry Mr. Vuga, I . . . I was just doing a little gridSkimming . . .” Milan looked up at Mr. Vuga, blinking as his eyes adjusted to Real.  He couldn’t think of anything else to say.  He was treading water, praying the eyeVid’s log hadn’t routed his netsurfing adventure straight to the Dean’s app.

“I’m surprised at you, Stemberg,” Mr. Vuga said, trying hard to not raise his voice too much and thereby violate strict study hall regulations, or worse, set off the decibel-monitor alarm.

Vuga was large and formless, and except for the face, his front side pretty much matched his backside.  Legend had it that he could fart out of his belly button.  He wore cheap sweatshop polyester suits, always rumpled and brown or beige.  He held Milan’s eyeVid as if it were toxic evidence of some heinous enviroCrime.

Everybody in the study hall was now staring at them.  Milan felt the blood rush to his face.  Be kool, act like nothing’s wrong!

“You’re not smart enough to hang out with Switch,” Mr. Vuga hissed with a curl of his lip, “so how did you manage to crash the Hejn Square and go offNet?”

Good question, now that Mr. Vuga’s harsh stare put things in perspective.  Mr. Vuga didn’t generally buy excuses, and right now Milan couldn’t think of one.  Not only had he crashed Pizza Square but he had netTranzed out of the eduZone, which was not only strictly forbidden but also, due to firewalls, very difficult to pull off.  That is, unless Audrey sent you some special fractals, but how were you supposed to know they would tunnel out of the eduZone and crash Pizza Square.  And that, well, that must be where the misunderstanding had occurred.  Maybe Audrey was busy with her exam and not thinking.  Maybe Milan should have made it clear to her that he was using a school-issued library eyeVid.  Or she assumed he wasn’t stupid enough to use a school-issued library eyeVid to go offNet in the school eduZone.  Yes, that was it, it was just a misunderstanding, but from the look Mr. Vuga was giving him one would have thought he had been caught with a vial of dreamWater or a week’s supply of Bulgarian tripTabs.

Milan uneasily shifted in his chair.  It felt uncomfortable.  Everything felt uncomfortable.  He knew that the penalty for going offNet (not to mention the crash) could be serious, and that it went on your record.  Which meant your parents were notified, and that definitely sucked.

“This is a misunderstanding Mr. Vuga, I wasn’t really offNet,” Milan lied as he looked up, brushing away a strand of hair so that Mr. Vulga could gaze even deeper into his big innocent brown eyes.  It didn’t work.

“That’s enough, Stemberg.  I’m taking you straight to Ms. Dietze’s office.”

The headmaster?!  Crap!  Milan’s heart sank.  It didn’t help that the grrrls over at the next table were giggling.

“I have no idea why it crashed!  And I wasn’t doing Xgames or anything,” protested Milan.  “It’s a misunderstanding.”  The depth of the hole he was in was now inescapably clear.  He was sitting in the “student’s chair,” facing the headmaster of Hejn Secondary who loomed on the other side of a lowGlow desk as vast as a megaCorp airstrip.  Milan desperately tried to channel Dano kool—unbothered, zero-kelvin.  Okay, so maybe that wasn’t working, but he prayed that at least he wasn’t fidgeting enough to set off the stress sensors.

Ms. Dietze, the headmaster, was a striking, slim, refined woman of about forty-five with coolly knowing blue eyes.  Today her lipstick was very dark and her eyelashes whitened to match her hair.  The collar on her black and white houndstooth suit framed her face and lent her an almost Elizabethan air of authority.  The lack of chip jewelry was conspicuous, unusual for a woman of her position.  Her look was as calculated and precise as a piece of clean code.  She leaned back in her chair and stared at the holo-screen hovering above her desk.  The room was agonizingly quiet as she silently followed the digital breadcrumbs of Milan’s offNet stunt.

“You may leave us now,” Ms. Dietze eventually spoke, addressing Mr. Vuga, who was hovering behind Milan like a hungry vulture, “and please close the door behind you.”

Mr. Vuga was visibly reluctant and disappointed, what with missing the pleasure of punishing a student and logging his disciplinary quota, but he had no choice.  He backed out of the room and shut the heavy door with a thud.

“Young man, the truth is that my hands are tied,” Ms. Dietze pointed out as soon as they were alone.  “First, you crashed Hejn Square, and second, you lied.  You were offNet…you were, after all, caught in the act.  Regrettably for you, the rules regarding such transgressions are quite clear.”

“But it was all due to a misunderstanding and I wasn’t doing Xgames or anything,” Milan repeated almost mechanically, quite sure by now that his situation was hopeless.

“I repeat, you flatlined Hejn Square,” Ms. Dietze said as she gazed at a holoScreen and waded through a stream of interactive data feeds floating above the soft glow of her huge desk, “and you did go offNet, and you lied about it to Mr. Vuga,” Ms. Dietze paused briefly to look at Milan, “these are all serious offences, and I’m not sure which one is the worst.”  Ms. Dietze’s voice had a frosty deliberate cadence calculated to turn students into intimidated blobs of wobbly jelly.  “By the way, I’m sure you’ll be happy to know Hejn Square is up and running again.”

Milan wasn’t sure if that was supposed to make him feel better.

Ms. Dietze continued shuffling through translucent pages passing through one another with a digital shimmer.  Absentmindedly she tapped her fingers on the smooth hard desk.  The clicking of long sharp silver nails reflecting on the incandescent desk surface was the only sound in the uncomfortable silence.

Milan could think of nothing to say so instead he looked straight ahead, trying hard not to stare at a flash of red lace that poked out of Ms. Dietze’s low neckline.

Ms. Dietze wears a red lace bra?

“Milan, I’ve known you for years and I cannot begin to catalogue my gratitude to your mother for all she has done for this school and for education in general.  You’ve always been a good student.”

Milan was quite certain his mother didn’t own any red lace bras.

There was another long silence.

“You keep insisting there was a misunderstanding.  Perhaps you’d like to explain what exactly you mean by that.  And perhaps you’d also like to explain how you managed all these shenanigans in the first place…”

Milan put away thoughts of red lace bras and silently cursed Audrey.  It was all her fault.  Of course she should have known that he just had a junky old app, and that he was in study hall and he was using a school eyeVid.  She had to have known.  But, as much as he felt like he could kill her right now, he wasn’t going to turn her in.  Not Audrey.

Milan hesitated at first, but then he decided that he had nothing to lose if he opened up and honestly explained why he got into this mess in the first place.

“Well, it’s about Dano . . .”

“Who?”

“Dano.  Dano Kalon.”        

“Dano Kalon?  Yes, I remember him,” the headmaster noted frostily. “It’s a shame someone so bright didn’t graduate with the rest of his class.”

“He hasn’t been around for three days,” replied Milan.

“And . . .?  His attendance, if I’m not mistaken, was never exactly exemplary.”

“But ma’m,” Milan blurted out, his words tripping over each other in a frantic jitter-stream of nerves.  “Well, like, that was school, but, well, that’s not it, not what I’m talking about now, I mean, what I mean is that what he says is always juice, and that’s the problem . . .  and I looked for him everywhere.  I looked in all the places, and I looked to see if there was something in SIMface or some ping somewhere or something anything somewhere, and, well, there wasn’t and. . .”

The headmaster held up her hand for Milan to stop.  A white gold bracelet slid down the black lace sleeve and caught the neon glare of the holoScreen.

“Young man, you’ve looked for Dano everywhere but in Real, which is where I would expect to find someone of the gRazer persuasion.”

“But, but—what I’m tryin’ to say is that there’s a really weird thing going on, ‘cause it’s not just like he’s just dropped his connection, it’s like he’s completely ghosted.  The blackout, it’s like total.  I mean, try googling him. You keep getting . . .”

Ms. Dietze held up her hand again.  She swiped through a flickering cascade of mid-air data streams and the look on her face morphed from frosty to dead serious.  Her voice hardened.  “My advice to you, young Stemberg,” she said, “is to cease searching for Dano Kalon.  You will not find him simply because, as far as we are all concerned, he doesn’t exist, and never did.”

With mouth wide open in glitch-lock astonishment, Milan stared at the headmaster.

“Catching flies will not change things, young man.  I repeat, Mr. Kalon has been completely purged from the core network.  He no longer exists, and if you know what’s good for you, you will stop searching for him.”

What?  No.  This couldn’t be happening.  Ms. Dietze knew Dano!  She just said so!  So how could he suddenly not exist?  But before any of this could sink in, she continued.  “And you, Milan, you are in deep, deep trouble.  I understand your panic at discovering your friend had vanished, but unfortunately that doesn’t change things.  I cannot overlook your violations.”  The headmaster’s wintry eyes sliced into Milan’s.  The point was inescapable.  Milan mumbled something which Ms. Dietze dismissively waved away as she quickly made some entries on the holoScreen.  As soon as she was done, she flicked it off.

“We don’t have much time, Milan,” Ms. Dietze said, keeping her voice low, “so listen to me very carefully.  First of all, the dataCache portal you so clumsily attempted to hack belongs to LibertyCorp, and they take such activities very seriously.  I will overlook it because as far as I’m concerned, it’s not a school affair.  I will say nothing, but I can’t promise the authorities won’t come looking for you.  Still, given who your mother is, maybe they won’t.  Second, I don’t like what has happened to your friend Dano, but there is very little I can do about it.   I do, however, have a contact you should talk to.  I don’t know what’s going on, I have no idea if he can help, but I do know you can trust him.”

As she spoke Ms. Dietze quickly scribbled a note on a piece of old-fashioned analog paper, folded it, and handed it to Milan.

“Hide this,” she said her voice dropping to a whisper, “in your pocket.  Now!”  It was clear she meant it.

Just then there was a loud knock and Mr. Vuga, all red-faced, breathless and uninvited, burst into the office.

“Sorry to intrude, Ms. Dietze, but I, ahh,” Ms. Dietze always made Mr. Vuga feel somewhat awkward, “thought it might be a bit of an, umm, emergency, as it were.  Your room’s security feed went dead.  Is, ahh, everything in order?  You never know with students these days . . .” Mr. Vuga growled as he looked at Milan, clearly thinking (or at least hoping) that maybe young Stemberg had gone berserk.

“Yes, thank you, Mr. Vuga.  I know that by bursting in here you are quite correctly following surveillance regulations,” Ms. Dietze threw a knowing little dark-lipped smile.  Mr. Vuga felt uncomfortably disarmed.  Milan just sat there in a total haptic freeze, stunned, wondering if it was his own brain or the entire world that was going more mental by the millisecond.

“I’m not sure how I managed, but I crashed the local grid.  You know how these things are, and unfortunately, I’m not too good with network terminals,” Ms. Dietze smoothly lied, “but, there,” she swiped the air and the holoScreen sparked to life, “the feed is up now.”

Mr. Vuga seemed unconvinced, but there was not much he could do.  He stood there wiping the sweat from under his toupee with a grimy old handkerchief, looking sullen and self-conscious and not certain how to act. This was the first time he had ever barged in on the headmaster.  The CCTV node had never gone pitch-black before.

“I think we’ve taken care of matters, then,” Ms. Dietze reverted to her sub-zero clip.  “You may both go . . . and Mr. Stemberg, remember, I will schedule a date for you to face Mr. Vuga’s disciplinary committee.  Until then I will be keeping a close eye on you . . .”

As Milan stood up Ms. Dietze gave him a sharp encrypted glance.  Milan hastily exited the office, wishing he knew what it meant.

“Well then, as long as, umm, everything is in order,” Mr. Vuga huffed.

“The door, please. Thank you, Mr. Vuga,” Ms. Dietze’s arctic voice reminded him.

“Er, yes, of course.”

Mr. Vuga trudged out the office and shut the door behind him.

Chapter 3