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 CHAPTER 2 Milan In School November 8, Thursday 11 A.M. Milan stood in front of his locker staring at the globe holo spinning round and round above his app. It was just after second period and he had given it another go. All morning he had been trying to get a hold of Dano. No connection pinpoint glowed. What’s going on? Why doesn’t he answer? This was the third day Dano hadn’t shown up anywhere. Yesterday had been Redcent day. They had made a date to go weeks ago, and Dano would never blow him off like that. Dano’s word was a matter of juice. Don’t say it if you don’t mean it. But yesterday afternoon Milan had waited for more than an hour at the Number 12 stop. No Dano. No explanation. No text, no Tweet, no Weibo, no message, no mail, no word, no nothing. 3.5 minutes. Milan extinguished his app and briefly crumpled the pliant device in his fist in disgust. Where is that math homework! Brainfart. We don’t have a test today, do we? Tomorrow. It’s tomorrow. Three minutes. Great, here comes Ascher. Don’t make eye contact! “Hey, Mildew, still using that crappy piece of junk? I’ll do you a favor and trash it.” Milan just managed to pull his app away as Ascher made a try to grab it. Jerk! I bet he’s recording this for Kiss My Ascher. Ascher was a “like” junky, a minor celebrity, and there was nothing he wouldn’t do to jack up ratings for his Kiss My Ascher YouTube show. You know, whatever your eyes see your chip can record. Ascher’s minor celebrity status guaranteed that he saw lots of eagerly grinding ass and enthusiastically bouncing tits, and, with the occasional practical joke thrown in (which was where Milan came in), it was enough to get shitloads of hits for Kiss My Ascher. In fact, the hits he got ran well into the upper six figures, and the vast majority consisted of likes. Yes, he was almost there, almost in the big time, in corporate marketing wet dream territory. This meant he got to do some consumer product endorsement and was showered with exclusive little gifts: wearable holos from Nike, TacoBell, whatever. On top of that his old man was loaded, so he had the absolute latest in quantum chips on his forehead, a Chonzin Paradise Ruby, in a Bulgari setting. Direct neural connections fast as lightning. Very kool, very showoff and very, very expensive. The only thing Ascher couldn’t sell was the fantasy he had of being Switch. Switch had to be earned. Switch was about popping tripTabs and neuroTranzing on hot-rodded quantum chips into deepFreak virtual netZones, melding mind directly into dataStreams for an in your face experience, a direct brain-to-net connection. But neuroTranzing in deepFreak could fry your mind. You had to know. That kind of knowing was what Switch was all about. Totally on and zoned, surf firewalls, hot-dog gates, rip through traps that could deadEnd you in a catatonic state forever, and then, if you find your way back out, you hope you’re still there, your mind still yours. Fly or fry they said, the only way to go when SIM and mind merge in the vast digital consciousness of the net. Switch knew they were the absolute kool fucking fuKool. To Switch, Ascher didn’t rate. In fact, he didn’t exist. Ascher shoved Milan into a locker and stared him down. “You’re ruining my view,” he whispered in what he thought was a tough voice. Ascher was in year ten, three years older than Milan. Milan wasn’t particularly athletic, tending instead toward the (only slightly, he told himself) plumpy. Still, he stood quite tall for his age and he unflinchingly returned the stare until Ascher, feigning disgust, let him go. “God, I hate filth,” Ascher sniffed as he walked off, cleaning his hands with a wetWipe. Milan slammed his locker shut. One minute. I can still make it! “PASSWORD!” the gargoyle intoned. The gargoyle always made Milan a little uneasy. Maybe it was the smoldering red eyes that stared straight into his and seemed to incinerate something way deep in his brain. Or maybe it was the really creepy leathery wings. Or a forked tongue that flickered in and out between sharp pointy vampire teeth. “HejnStem746. No, I mean 7446.” The gargoyle’s fiery eyes didn’t waver. The tongue flickered a few times. Why did the school mascot have to be this weird gargoyle? Why not something normal? Like maybe a cat, or a bear or even a river rat or a duck or something. “Sorry, sorry. I mean HejStem7446.” “YOU MAY ENTER!” The leathery wings spread and the gargoyle morphed into smoke and then vanished, its sharp glowing outline now an entrance portal. Milan passed through into the school’s virtual town square, officially known as SIM Square or the Hejn Center. It was a large square topped by a vast dark dome that was barely discernible high above the mists that glowed in school colours and lazily drifted overhead. A continuous colonnade enclosed the square, like an ideal Renaissance piazza, which is why the students referred to it as Pizza Square. Milan sat himself on a SIMbench and began thinking. He scanned to see if Dano had posted anywhere. It went without saying that Dano didn’t post much. He didn’t faceBook either, he was no faceFreak. SIMfacing and holoFacing weren’t juice, and definitely not deMode. Unfortunately, school firewalls prevented Milan from checking out any of the rad SIMlounges, the kind Dano might actually hang out in, such as myUncle’sPyjamas, the atLounge or the tangledFormat. After thinking and SIMsearching for a while, Milan concluded he had pretty much run out of options. Sure, it was no surprise that Dano didn’t do web. He was, after all, acknowledged as the gRazer. What was surprising was that the web wasn’t doing Dano. Milan knew that even the most committed offGrid gRazer couldn’t take himself offNet. You may be uninterested in the web, but you can’t stop it from being interested in you. Besides, nothing ever really disappears on the web, so there’s stuff buried somewhere about everyone. Like your third grade holo in Mrs. Parker’s class. Or the stupid vid you posted years ago and now you really wish you hadn’t. And even if you never posted, there’s a CCTV shot of you standing in line at the KandyKastle picking your nose. But this, this was creepy. This was impossible. This couldn’t happen. There was nothing. Nothing. This meant he needed Switch. Switch knew about this kind of thing. Luckily, Audrey was Switch, and she was good. Really good. Besides, Audrey was like a sister to Milan, and Dano’s oldest friend, so in any case she’d want to know. Milan sent Audrey a brief text: ‘dano missing 2 days, no hits on google.’ That was his first mistake, as he was still sitting in the Pizza. Nevertheless, much to his delight he received an answer from Audrey right away: ‘taking exam but took qwk look in google. u r right. try:
when you pass, code is:’
Kool! Fractal programs! Without stopping to think, Milan copyPasted the first fractal and waited. At first nothing happened. Then the shit hit the fan. Oh crap! Everything crashed and collapsed into an enormous pile of data rubble that began to turn white hot under the compression of it’s own information weight. Wow! This is like totally beyond amazing SIM! Way fuKool! Without warning Milan was thrust onto a fiber optic dataStream, a sensation like being whiplashed by a rocket sled or the rush down the first drop of a monster rollercoaster, his head spinning as he hurtled along. A second later a sudden halt stopped him instantly, a thousand to zero in zero. That kinda sucked! I’m feeling sick. Giddy, shaky, nauseated, disoriented, he stared at a blank dull grey steel firewall. It took a moment for his mind to stop moving and his stomach to settle to just a little queasy, and then he noticed the keypad. He figured he’d enter the passCode. It was painfully clear that Milan was no dataTraveller. Milan entered:
and immediately a small section of the steel wall dematerialized revealing a cubicle, like a safe, with a pile of documents in it. Milan reached for one but as he did suddenly and without warning the world spun so fast he felt dizzy and 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 study hall 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. Things were still moving too much in his head, and Mr. Vuga’s face was bright and red and greasy and kind of disgusting and just 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 surfing a little...” 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. “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 noise 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 made-in-some-third-world-toilet-sweatshop polyester Walmart 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. Don’t give yourself away! Be kool, act like nothing’s wrong! “You’re not smart enough to hang out with Switch. Why would you be stupid enough to even try going offNet?” Good question, now that Mr. Vuga’s harsh stare put things in perspective. He didn’t generally buy excuses, and right now Milan couldn’t think of one. He had netTranzed from the Pizza, which was not only strictly forbidden but also, due to firewalls, very difficult to do. That is, unless Audrey sent you some special fractals. And that, well, that was where the misunderstanding had occurred. Maybe Audrey was busy with her exam and not thinking. Maybe Milan hadn’t made it clear to Audrey that he was using a school eyeVid. Or she assumed he wouldn’t be stupid enough to go offNet while 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 suddenly felt uncomfortable. He knew that the penalty for going offNet 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.

Chapter Two Continued
 CHAPTER 2 Milan In School November 8, Thursday 11 A.M. Milan stood in front of his locker staring at the globe holo spinning round and round above his app. It was just after second period and he had given it another go. All morning he had been trying to get a hold of Dano. No connection pinpoint glowed. What’s going on? Why doesn’t he answer? This was the third day Dano hadn’t shown up anywhere. Yesterday had been Redcent day. They had made a date to go weeks ago, and Dano would never blow him off like that. Dano’s word was a matter of juice. Don’t say it if you don’t mean it. But yesterday afternoon Milan had waited for more than an hour at the Number 12 stop. No Dano. No explanation. No text, no Tweet, no Weibo, no message, no mail, no word, no nothing. 3.5 minutes. Milan extinguished his app and briefly crumpled the pliant device in his fist in disgust. Where is that math homework! Brainfart. We don’t have a test today, do we? Tomorrow. It’s tomorrow. Three minutes. Great, here comes Ascher. Don’t make eye contact! “Hey, Mildew, still using that crappy piece of junk? I’ll do you a favor and trash it.” Milan just managed to pull his app away as Ascher made a try to grab it. Jerk! I bet he’s recording this for Kiss My Ascher. Ascher was a “like” junky, a minor celebrity, and there was nothing he wouldn’t do to jack up ratings for his Kiss My Ascher YouTube show. You know, whatever your eyes see your chip can record. Ascher’s minor celebrity status guaranteed that he saw lots of eagerly grinding ass and enthusiastically bouncing tits, and, with the occasional practical joke thrown in (which was where Milan came in), it was enough to get shitloads of hits for Kiss My Ascher. In fact, the hits he got ran well into the upper six figures, and the vast majority consisted of likes. Yes, he was almost there, almost in the big time, in corporate marketing wet dream territory. This meant he got to do some consumer product endorsement and was showered with exclusive little gifts: wearable holos from Nike, TacoBell, whatever. On top of that his old man was loaded, so he had the absolute latest in quantum chips on his forehead, a Chonzin Paradise Ruby, in a Bulgari setting. Direct neural connections fast as lightning. Very kool, very showoff and very, very expensive. The only thing Ascher couldn’t sell was the fantasy he had of being Switch. Switch had to be earned. Switch was about popping tripTabs and neuroTranzing on hot-rodded quantum chips into deepFreak virtual netZones, melding mind directly into dataStreams for an in your face experience, a direct brain-to-net connection. But neuroTranzing in deepFreak could fry your mind. You had to know. That kind of knowing was what Switch was all about. Totally on and zoned, surf firewalls, hot-dog gates, rip through traps that could deadEnd you in a catatonic state forever, and then, if you find your way back out, you hope you’re still there, your mind still yours. Fly or fry they said, the only way to go when SIM and mind merge in the vast digital consciousness of the net. Switch knew they were the absolute kool fucking fuKool. To Switch, Ascher didn’t rate. In fact, he didn’t exist. Ascher shoved Milan into a locker and stared him down. “You’re ruining my view,” he whispered in what he thought was a tough voice. Ascher was in year ten, three years older than Milan. Milan wasn’t particularly athletic, tending instead toward the (only slightly, he told himself) plumpy. Still, he stood quite tall for his age and he unflinchingly returned the stare until Ascher, feigning disgust, let him go. “God, I hate filth,” Ascher sniffed as he walked off, cleaning his hands with a wetWipe. Milan slammed his locker shut. One minute. I can still make it! “PASSWORD!” the gargoyle intoned. The gargoyle always made Milan a little uneasy. Maybe it was the smoldering red eyes that stared straight into his and seemed to incinerate something way deep in his brain. Or maybe it was the really creepy leathery wings. Or a forked tongue that flickered in and out between sharp pointy vampire teeth. “HejnStem746. No, I mean 7446.” The gargoyle’s fiery eyes didn’t waver. The tongue flickered a few times. Why did the school mascot have to be this weird gargoyle? Why not something normal? Like maybe a cat, or a bear or even a river rat or a duck or something. “Sorry, sorry. I mean HejStem7446.” “YOU MAY ENTER!” The leathery wings spread and the gargoyle morphed into smoke and then vanished, its sharp glowing outline now an entrance portal. Milan passed through into the school’s virtual town square, officially known as SIM Square or the Hejn Center. It was a large square topped by a vast dark dome that was barely discernible high above the mists that glowed in school colours and lazily drifted overhead. A continuous colonnade enclosed the square, like an ideal Renaissance piazza, which is why the students referred to it as Pizza Square. Milan sat himself on a SIMbench and began thinking. He scanned to see if Dano had posted anywhere. It went without saying that Dano didn’t post much. He didn’t faceBook either, he was no faceFreak. SIMfacing and holoFacing weren’t juice, and definitely not deMode. Unfortunately, school firewalls prevented Milan from checking out any of the rad SIMlounges, the kind Dano might actually hang out in, such as myUncle’sPyjamas, the atLounge or the tangledFormat. After thinking and SIMsearching for a while, Milan concluded he had pretty much run out of options. Sure, it was no surprise that Dano didn’t do web. He was, after all, acknowledged as the gRazer. What was surprising was that the web wasn’t doing Dano. Milan knew that even the most committed offGrid gRazer couldn’t take himself offNet. You may be uninterested in the web, but you can’t stop it from being interested in you. Besides, nothing ever really disappears on the web, so there’s stuff buried somewhere about everyone. Like your third grade holo in Mrs. Parker’s class. Or the stupid vid you posted years ago and now you really wish you hadn’t. And even if you never posted, there’s a CCTV shot of you standing in line at the KandyKastle picking your nose. But this, this was creepy. This was impossible. This couldn’t happen. There was nothing. Nothing. This meant he needed Switch. Switch knew about this kind of thing. Luckily, Audrey was Switch, and she was good. Really good. Besides, Audrey was like a sister to Milan, and Dano’s oldest friend, so in any case she’d want to know. Milan sent Audrey a brief text: ‘dano missing 2 days, no hits on google.’ That was his first mistake, as he was still sitting in the Pizza. Nevertheless, much to his delight he received an answer from Audrey right away: ‘taking exam but took qwk look in google. u r right. try:
when you pass, code is:’
Kool! Fractal programs! Without stopping to think, Milan copyPasted the first fractal and waited. At first nothing happened. Then the shit hit the fan. Oh crap! Everything crashed and collapsed into an enormous pile of data rubble that began to turn white hot under the compression of it’s own information weight. Wow! This is like totally beyond amazing SIM! Way fuKool! Without warning Milan was thrust onto a fiber optic dataStream, a sensation like being whiplashed by a rocket sled or the rush down the first drop of a monster rollercoaster, his head spinning as he hurtled along. A second later a sudden halt stopped him instantly, a thousand to zero in zero. That kinda sucked! I’m feeling sick. Giddy, shaky, nauseated, disoriented, he stared at a blank dull grey steel firewall. It took a moment for his mind to stop moving and his stomach to settle to just a little queasy, and then he noticed the keypad. He figured he’d enter the passCode. It was painfully clear that Milan was no dataTraveller. Milan entered:
and immediately a small section of the steel wall dematerialized revealing a cubicle, like a safe, with a pile of documents in it. Milan reached for one but as he did suddenly and without warning the world spun so fast he felt dizzy and 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 study hall 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. Things were still moving too much in his head, and Mr. Vuga’s face was bright and red and greasy and kind of disgusting and just 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 surfing a little...” 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. “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 noise 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 made-in-some-third-world-toilet-sweatshop polyester Walmart 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. Don’t give yourself away! Be kool, act like nothing’s wrong! “You’re not smart enough to hang out with Switch. Why would you be stupid enough to even try going offNet?” Good question, now that Mr. Vuga’s harsh stare put things in perspective. He didn’t generally buy excuses, and right now Milan couldn’t think of one. He had netTranzed from the Pizza, which was not only strictly forbidden but also, due to firewalls, very difficult to do. That is, unless Audrey sent you some special fractals. And that, well, that was where the misunderstanding had occurred. Maybe Audrey was busy with her exam and not thinking. Maybe Milan hadn’t made it clear to Audrey that he was using a school eyeVid. Or she assumed he wouldn’t be stupid enough to go offNet while 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 suddenly felt uncomfortable. He knew that the penalty for going offNet 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.
 CHAPTER 2 Milan In School November 8, Thursday 11 A.M. Milan stood in front of his locker staring at the globe holo spinning round and round above his app. It was just after second period and he had given it another go. All morning he had been trying to get a hold of Dano. No connection pinpoint glowed. What’s going on? Why doesn’t he answer? This was the third day Dano hadn’t shown up anywhere. Yesterday had been Redcent day. They had made a date to go weeks ago, and Dano would never blow him off like that. Dano’s word was a matter of juice. Don’t say it if you don’t mean it. But yesterday afternoon Milan had waited for more than an hour at the Number 12 stop. No Dano. No explanation. No text, no Tweet, no Weibo, no message, no mail, no word, no nothing. 3.5 minutes. Milan extinguished his app and briefly crumpled the pliant device in his fist in disgust. Where is that math homework! Brainfart. We don’t have a test today, do we? Tomorrow. It’s tomorrow. Three minutes. Great, here comes Ascher. Don’t make eye contact! “Hey, Mildew, still using that crappy piece of junk? I’ll do you a favor and trash it.” Milan just managed to pull his app away as Ascher made a try to grab it. Jerk! I bet he’s recording this for Kiss My Ascher. Ascher was a “like” junky, a minor celebrity, and there was nothing he wouldn’t do to jack up ratings for his Kiss My Ascher YouTube show. You know, whatever your eyes see your chip can record. Ascher’s minor celebrity status guaranteed that he saw lots of eagerly grinding ass and enthusiastically bouncing tits, and, with the occasional practical joke thrown in (which was where Milan came in), it was enough to get shitloads of hits for Kiss My Ascher. In fact, the hits he got ran well into the upper six figures, and the vast majority consisted of likes. Yes, he was almost there, almost in the big time, in corporate marketing wet dream territory. This meant he got to do some consumer product endorsement and was showered with exclusive little gifts: wearable holos from Nike, TacoBell, whatever. On top of that his old man was loaded, so he had the absolute latest in quantum chips on his forehead, a Chonzin Paradise Ruby, in a Bulgari setting. Direct neural connections fast as lightning. Very kool, very showoff and very, very expensive. The only thing Ascher couldn’t sell was the fantasy he had of being Switch. Switch had to be earned. Switch was about popping tripTabs and neuroTranzing on hot-rodded quantum chips into deepFreak virtual netZones, melding mind directly into dataStreams for an in your face experience, a direct brain-to-net connection. But neuroTranzing in deepFreak could fry your mind. You had to know. That kind of knowing was what Switch was all about. Totally on and zoned, surf firewalls, hot-dog gates, rip through traps that could deadEnd you in a catatonic state forever, and then, if you find your way back out, you hope you’re still there, your mind still yours. Fly or fry they said, the only way to go when SIM and mind merge in the vast digital consciousness of the net. Switch knew they were the absolute kool fucking fuKool. To Switch, Ascher didn’t rate. In fact, he didn’t exist. Ascher shoved Milan into a locker and stared him down. “You’re ruining my view,” he whispered in what he thought was a tough voice. Ascher was in year ten, three years older than Milan. Milan wasn’t particularly athletic, tending instead toward the (only slightly, he told himself) plumpy. Still, he stood quite tall for his age and he unflinchingly returned the stare until Ascher, feigning disgust, let him go. “God, I hate filth,” Ascher sniffed as he walked off, cleaning his hands with a wetWipe. Milan slammed his locker shut. One minute. I can still make it! “PASSWORD!” the gargoyle intoned. The gargoyle always made Milan a little uneasy. Maybe it was the smoldering red eyes that stared straight into his and seemed to incinerate something way deep in his brain. Or maybe it was the really creepy leathery wings. Or a forked tongue that flickered in and out between sharp pointy vampire teeth. “HejnStem746. No, I mean 7446.” The gargoyle’s fiery eyes didn’t waver. The tongue flickered a few times. Why did the school mascot have to be this weird gargoyle? Why not something normal? Like maybe a cat, or a bear or even a river rat or a duck or something. “Sorry, sorry. I mean HejStem7446.” “YOU MAY ENTER!” The leathery wings spread and the gargoyle morphed into smoke and then vanished, its sharp glowing outline now an entrance portal. Milan passed through into the school’s virtual town square, officially known as SIM Square or the Hejn Center. It was a large square topped by a vast dark dome that was barely discernible high above the mists that glowed in school colours and lazily drifted overhead. A continuous colonnade enclosed the square, like an ideal Renaissance piazza, which is why the students referred to it as Pizza Square. Milan sat himself on a SIMbench and began thinking. He scanned to see if Dano had posted anywhere. It went without saying that Dano didn’t post much. He didn’t faceBook either, he was no faceFreak. SIMfacing and holoFacing weren’t juice, and definitely not deMode. Unfortunately, school firewalls prevented Milan from checking out any of the rad SIMlounges, the kind Dano might actually hang out in, such as myUncle’sPyjamas, the atLounge or the tangledFormat. After thinking and SIMsearching for a while, Milan concluded he had pretty much run out of options. Sure, it was no surprise that Dano didn’t do web. He was, after all, acknowledged as the gRazer. What was surprising was that the web wasn’t doing Dano. Milan knew that even the most committed offGrid gRazer couldn’t take himself offNet. You may be uninterested in the web, but you can’t stop it from being interested in you. Besides, nothing ever really disappears on the web, so there’s stuff buried somewhere about everyone. Like your third grade holo in Mrs. Parker’s class. Or the stupid vid you posted years ago and now you really wish you hadn’t. And even if you never posted, there’s a CCTV shot of you standing in line at the KandyKastle picking your nose. But this, this was creepy. This was impossible. This couldn’t happen. There was nothing. Nothing. This meant he needed Switch. Switch knew about this kind of thing. Luckily, Audrey was Switch, and she was good. Really good. Besides, Audrey was like a sister to Milan, and Dano’s oldest friend, so in any case she’d want to know. Milan sent Audrey a brief text: ‘dano missing 2 days, no hits on google.’ That was his first mistake, as he was still sitting in the Pizza. Nevertheless, much to his delight he received an answer from Audrey right away: ‘taking exam but took qwk look in google. u r right. try:
when you pass, code is:’
Kool! Fractal programs! Without stopping to think, Milan copyPasted the first fractal and waited. At first nothing happened. Then the shit hit the fan. Oh crap! Everything crashed and collapsed into an enormous pile of data rubble that began to turn white hot under the compression of it’s own information weight. Wow! This is like totally beyond amazing SIM! Way fuKool! Without warning Milan was thrust onto a fiber optic dataStream, a sensation like being whiplashed by a rocket sled or the rush down the first drop of a monster rollercoaster, his head spinning as he hurtled along. A second later a sudden halt stopped him instantly, a thousand to zero in zero. That kinda sucked! I’m feeling sick. Giddy, shaky, nauseated, disoriented, he stared at a blank dull grey steel firewall. It took a moment for his mind to stop moving and his stomach to settle to just a little queasy, and then he noticed the keypad. He figured he’d enter the passCode. It was painfully clear that Milan was no dataTraveller. Milan entered:
and immediately a small section of the steel wall dematerialized revealing a cubicle, like a safe, with a pile of documents in it. Milan reached for one but as he did suddenly and without warning the world spun so fast he felt dizzy and 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 study hall 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. Things were still moving too much in his head, and Mr. Vuga’s face was bright and red and greasy and kind of disgusting and just 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 surfing a little...” 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. “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 noise 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 made-in-some-third-world-toilet-sweatshop polyester Walmart 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. Don’t give yourself away! Be kool, act like nothing’s wrong! “You’re not smart enough to hang out with Switch. Why would you be stupid enough to even try going offNet?” Good question, now that Mr. Vuga’s harsh stare put things in perspective. He didn’t generally buy excuses, and right now Milan couldn’t think of one. He had netTranzed from the Pizza, which was not only strictly forbidden but also, due to firewalls, very difficult to do. That is, unless Audrey sent you some special fractals. And that, well, that was where the misunderstanding had occurred. Maybe Audrey was busy with her exam and not thinking. Maybe Milan hadn’t made it clear to Audrey that he was using a school eyeVid. Or she assumed he wouldn’t be stupid enough to go offNet while 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 suddenly felt uncomfortable. He knew that the penalty for going offNet 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.
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 CHAPTER 2 Milan In School November 8, Thursday 11 A.M. Milan stood in front of his locker staring at the globe holo spinning round and round above his app. It was just after second period and he had given it another go. All morning he had been trying to get a hold of Dano. No connection pinpoint glowed. What’s going on? Why doesn’t he answer? This was the third day Dano hadn’t shown up anywhere. Yesterday had been Redcent day. They had made a date to go weeks ago, and Dano would never blow him off like that. Dano’s word was a matter of juice. Don’t say it if you don’t mean it. But yesterday afternoon Milan had waited for more than an hour at the Number 12 stop. No Dano. No explanation. No text, no Tweet, no Weibo, no message, no mail, no word, no nothing. 3.5 minutes. Milan extinguished his app and briefly crumpled the pliant device in his fist in disgust. Where is that math homework! Brainfart. We don’t have a test today, do we? Tomorrow. It’s tomorrow. Three minutes. Great, here comes Ascher. Don’t make eye contact! “Hey, Mildew, still using that crappy piece of junk? I’ll do you a favor and trash it.” Milan just managed to pull his app away as Ascher made a try to grab it. Jerk! I bet he’s recording this for Kiss My Ascher. Ascher was a “like” junky, a minor celebrity, and there was nothing he wouldn’t do to jack up ratings for his Kiss My Ascher YouTube show. You know, whatever your eyes see your chip can record. Ascher’s minor celebrity status guaranteed that he saw lots of eagerly grinding ass and enthusiastically bouncing tits, and, with the occasional practical joke thrown in (which was where Milan came in), it was enough to get shitloads of hits for Kiss My Ascher. In fact, the hits he got ran well into the upper six figures, and the vast majority consisted of likes. Yes, he was almost there, almost in the big time, in corporate marketing wet dream territory. This meant he got to do some consumer product endorsement and was showered with exclusive little gifts: wearable holos from Nike, TacoBell, whatever. On top of that his old man was loaded, so he had the absolute latest in quantum chips on his forehead, a Chonzin Paradise Ruby, in a Bulgari setting. Direct neural connections fast as lightning. Very kool, very showoff and very, very expensive. The only thing Ascher couldn’t sell was the fantasy he had of being Switch. Switch had to be earned. Switch was about popping tripTabs and neuroTranzing on hot-rodded quantum chips into deepFreak virtual netZones, melding mind directly into dataStreams for an in your face experience, a direct brain-to-net connection. But neuroTranzing in deepFreak could fry your mind. You had to know. That kind of knowing was what Switch was all about. Totally on and zoned, surf firewalls, hot-dog gates, rip through traps that could deadEnd you in a catatonic state forever, and then, if you find your way back out, you hope you’re still there, your mind still yours. Fly or fry they said, the only way to go when SIM and mind merge in the vast digital consciousness of the net. Switch knew they were the absolute kool fucking fuKool. To Switch, Ascher didn’t rate. In fact, he didn’t exist. Ascher shoved Milan into a locker and stared him down. “You’re ruining my view,” he whispered in what he thought was a tough voice. Ascher was in year ten, three years older than Milan. Milan wasn’t particularly athletic, tending instead toward the (only slightly, he told himself) plumpy. Still, he stood quite tall for his age and he unflinchingly returned the stare until Ascher, feigning disgust, let him go. “God, I hate filth,” Ascher sniffed as he walked off, cleaning his hands with a wetWipe. Milan slammed his locker shut. One minute. I can still make it! “PASSWORD!” the gargoyle intoned. The gargoyle always made Milan a little uneasy. Maybe it was the smoldering red eyes that stared straight into his and seemed to incinerate something way deep in his brain. Or maybe it was the really creepy leathery wings. Or a forked tongue that flickered in and out between sharp pointy vampire teeth. “HejnStem746. No, I mean 7446.” The gargoyle’s fiery eyes didn’t waver. The tongue flickered a few times. Why did the school mascot have to be this weird gargoyle? Why not something normal? Like maybe a cat, or a bear or even a river rat or a duck or something. “Sorry, sorry. I mean HejStem7446.” “YOU MAY ENTER!” The leathery wings spread and the gargoyle morphed into smoke and then vanished, its sharp glowing outline now an entrance portal. Milan passed through into the school’s virtual town square, officially known as SIM Square or the Hejn Center. It was a large square topped by a vast dark dome that was barely discernible high above the mists that glowed in school colours and lazily drifted overhead. A continuous colonnade enclosed the square, like an ideal Renaissance piazza, which is why the students referred to it as Pizza Square. Milan sat himself on a SIMbench and began thinking. He scanned to see if Dano had posted anywhere. It went without saying that Dano didn’t post much. He didn’t faceBook either, he was no faceFreak. SIMfacing and holoFacing weren’t juice, and definitely not deMode. Unfortunately, school firewalls prevented Milan from checking out any of the rad SIMlounges, the kind Dano might actually hang out in, such as myUncle’sPyjamas, the atLounge or the tangledFormat. After thinking and SIMsearching for a while, Milan concluded he had pretty much run out of options. Sure, it was no surprise that Dano didn’t do web. He was, after all, acknowledged as the gRazer. What was surprising was that the web wasn’t doing Dano. Milan knew that even the most committed offGrid gRazer couldn’t take himself offNet. You may be uninterested in the web, but you can’t stop it from being interested in you. Besides, nothing ever really disappears on the web, so there’s stuff buried somewhere about everyone. Like your third grade holo in Mrs. Parker’s class. Or the stupid vid you posted years ago and now you really wish you hadn’t. And even if you never posted, there’s a CCTV shot of you standing in line at the KandyKastle picking your nose. But this, this was creepy. This was impossible. This couldn’t happen. There was nothing. Nothing. This meant he needed Switch. Switch knew about this kind of thing. Luckily, Audrey was Switch, and she was good. Really good. Besides, Audrey was like a sister to Milan, and Dano’s oldest friend, so in any case she’d want to know. Milan sent Audrey a brief text: ‘dano missing 2 days, no hits on google.’ That was his first mistake, as he was still sitting in the Pizza. Nevertheless, much to his delight he received an answer from Audrey right away: ‘taking exam but took qwk look in google. u r right. try:
when you pass, code is:’
Kool! Fractal programs! Without stopping to think, Milan copyPasted the first fractal and waited. At first nothing happened. Then the shit hit the fan. Oh crap! Everything crashed and collapsed into an enormous pile of data rubble that began to turn white hot under the compression of it’s own information weight. Wow! This is like totally beyond amazing SIM! Way fuKool! Without warning Milan was thrust onto a fiber optic dataStream, a sensation like being whiplashed by a rocket sled or the rush down the first drop of a monster rollercoaster, his head spinning as he hurtled along. A second later a sudden halt stopped him instantly, a thousand to zero in zero. That kinda sucked! I’m feeling sick. Giddy, shaky, nauseated, disoriented, he stared at a blank dull grey steel firewall. It took a moment for his mind to stop moving and his stomach to settle to just a little queasy, and then he noticed the keypad. He figured he’d enter the passCode. It was painfully clear that Milan was no dataTraveller. Milan entered:
and immediately a small section of the steel wall dematerialized revealing a cubicle, like a safe, with a pile of documents in it. Milan reached for one but as he did suddenly and without warning the world spun so fast he felt dizzy and 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 study hall 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. Things were still moving too much in his head, and Mr. Vuga’s face was bright and red and greasy and kind of disgusting and just 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 surfing a little...” 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. “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 noise 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 made-in-some-third-world-toilet-sweatshop polyester Walmart 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. Don’t give yourself away! Be kool, act like nothing’s wrong! “You’re not smart enough to hang out with Switch. Why would you be stupid enough to even try going offNet?” Good question, now that Mr. Vuga’s harsh stare put things in perspective. He didn’t generally buy excuses, and right now Milan couldn’t think of one. He had netTranzed from the Pizza, which was not only strictly forbidden but also, due to firewalls, very difficult to do. That is, unless Audrey sent you some special fractals. And that, well, that was where the misunderstanding had occurred. Maybe Audrey was busy with her exam and not thinking. Maybe Milan hadn’t made it clear to Audrey that he was using a school eyeVid. Or she assumed he wouldn’t be stupid enough to go offNet while 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 suddenly felt uncomfortable. He knew that the penalty for going offNet 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.
 CHAPTER 2 Milan In School November 8, Thursday 11 A.M. Milan stood in front of his locker staring at the globe holo spinning round and round above his app. It was just after second period and he had given it another go. All morning he had been trying to get a hold of Dano. No connection pinpoint glowed. What’s going on? Why doesn’t he answer? This was the third day Dano hadn’t shown up anywhere. Yesterday had been Redcent day. They had made a date to go weeks ago, and Dano would never blow him off like that. Dano’s word was a matter of juice. Don’t say it if you don’t mean it. But yesterday afternoon Milan had waited for more than an hour at the Number 12 stop. No Dano. No explanation. No text, no Tweet, no Weibo, no message, no mail, no word, no nothing. 3.5 minutes. Milan extinguished his app and briefly crumpled the pliant device in his fist in disgust. Where is that math homework! Brainfart. We don’t have a test today, do we? Tomorrow. It’s tomorrow. Three minutes. Great, here comes Ascher. Don’t make eye contact! “Hey, Mildew, still using that crappy piece of junk? I’ll do you a favor and trash it.” Milan just managed to pull his app away as Ascher made a try to grab it. Jerk! I bet he’s recording this for Kiss My Ascher. Ascher was a “like” junky, a minor celebrity, and there was nothing he wouldn’t do to jack up ratings for his Kiss My Ascher YouTube show. You know, whatever your eyes see your chip can record. Ascher’s minor celebrity status guaranteed that he saw lots of eagerly grinding ass and enthusiastically bouncing tits, and, with the occasional practical joke thrown in (which was where Milan came in), it was enough to get shitloads of hits for Kiss My Ascher. In fact, the hits he got ran well into the upper six figures, and the vast majority consisted of likes. Yes, he was almost there, almost in the big time, in corporate marketing wet dream territory. This meant he got to do some consumer product endorsement and was showered with exclusive little gifts: wearable holos from Nike, TacoBell, whatever. On top of that his old man was loaded, so he had the absolute latest in quantum chips on his forehead, a Chonzin Paradise Ruby, in a Bulgari setting. Direct neural connections fast as lightning. Very kool, very showoff and very, very expensive. The only thing Ascher couldn’t sell was the fantasy he had of being Switch. Switch had to be earned. Switch was about popping tripTabs and neuroTranzing on hot-rodded quantum chips into deepFreak virtual netZones, melding mind directly into dataStreams for an in your face experience, a direct brain-to-net connection. But neuroTranzing in deepFreak could fry your mind. You had to know. That kind of knowing was what Switch was all about. Totally on and zoned, surf firewalls, hot-dog gates, rip through traps that could deadEnd you in a catatonic state forever, and then, if you find your way back out, you hope you’re still there, your mind still yours. Fly or fry they said, the only way to go when SIM and mind merge in the vast digital consciousness of the net. Switch knew they were the absolute kool fucking fuKool. To Switch, Ascher didn’t rate. In fact, he didn’t exist. Ascher shoved Milan into a locker and stared him down. “You’re ruining my view,” he whispered in what he thought was a tough voice. Ascher was in year ten, three years older than Milan. Milan wasn’t particularly athletic, tending instead toward the (only slightly, he told himself) plumpy. Still, he stood quite tall for his age and he unflinchingly returned the stare until Ascher, feigning disgust, let him go. “God, I hate filth,” Ascher sniffed as he walked off, cleaning his hands with a wetWipe. Milan slammed his locker shut. One minute. I can still make it! “PASSWORD!” the gargoyle intoned. The gargoyle always made Milan a little uneasy. Maybe it was the smoldering red eyes that stared straight into his and seemed to incinerate something way deep in his brain. Or maybe it was the really creepy leathery wings. Or a forked tongue that flickered in and out between sharp pointy vampire teeth. “HejnStem746. No, I mean 7446.” The gargoyle’s fiery eyes didn’t waver. The tongue flickered a few times. Why did the school mascot have to be this weird gargoyle? Why not something normal? Like maybe a cat, or a bear or even a river rat or a duck or something. “Sorry, sorry. I mean HejStem7446.” “YOU MAY ENTER!” The leathery wings spread and the gargoyle morphed into smoke and then vanished, its sharp glowing outline now an entrance portal. Milan passed through into the school’s virtual town square, officially known as SIM Square or the Hejn Center. It was a large square topped by a vast dark dome that was barely discernible high above the mists that glowed in school colours and lazily drifted overhead. A continuous colonnade enclosed the square, like an ideal Renaissance piazza, which is why the students referred to it as Pizza Square. Milan sat himself on a SIMbench and began thinking. He scanned to see if Dano had posted anywhere. It went without saying that Dano didn’t post much. He didn’t faceBook either, he was no faceFreak. SIMfacing and holoFacing weren’t juice, and definitely not deMode. Unfortunately, school firewalls prevented Milan from checking out any of the rad SIMlounges, the kind Dano might actually hang out in, such as myUncle’sPyjamas, the atLounge or the tangledFormat. After thinking and SIMsearching for a while, Milan concluded he had pretty much run out of options. Sure, it was no surprise that Dano didn’t do web. He was, after all, acknowledged as the gRazer. What was surprising was that the web wasn’t doing Dano. Milan knew that even the most committed offGrid gRazer couldn’t take himself offNet. You may be uninterested in the web, but you can’t stop it from being interested in you. Besides, nothing ever really disappears on the web, so there’s stuff buried somewhere about everyone. Like your third grade holo in Mrs. Parker’s class. Or the stupid vid you posted years ago and now you really wish you hadn’t. And even if you never posted, there’s a CCTV shot of you standing in line at the KandyKastle picking your nose. But this, this was creepy. This was impossible. This couldn’t happen. There was nothing. Nothing. This meant he needed Switch. Switch knew about this kind of thing. Luckily, Audrey was Switch, and she was good. Really good. Besides, Audrey was like a sister to Milan, and Dano’s oldest friend, so in any case she’d want to know. Milan sent Audrey a brief text: ‘dano missing 2 days, no hits on google.’ That was his first mistake, as he was still sitting in the Pizza. Nevertheless, much to his delight he received an answer from Audrey right away: ‘taking exam but took qwk look in google. u r right. try:
when you pass, code is:’
Kool! Fractal programs! Without stopping to think, Milan copyPasted the first fractal and waited. At first nothing happened. Then the shit hit the fan. Oh crap! Everything crashed and collapsed into an enormous pile of data rubble that began to turn white hot under the compression of it’s own information weight. Wow! This is like totally beyond amazing SIM! Way fuKool! Without warning Milan was thrust onto a fiber optic dataStream, a sensation like being whiplashed by a rocket sled or the rush down the first drop of a monster rollercoaster, his head spinning as he hurtled along. A second later a sudden halt stopped him instantly, a thousand to zero in zero. That kinda sucked! I’m feeling sick. Giddy, shaky, nauseated, disoriented, he stared at a blank dull grey steel firewall. It took a moment for his mind to stop moving and his stomach to settle to just a little queasy, and then he noticed the keypad. He figured he’d enter the passCode. It was painfully clear that Milan was no dataTraveller. Milan entered:
and immediately a small section of the steel wall dematerialized revealing a cubicle, like a safe, with a pile of documents in it. Milan reached for one but as he did suddenly and without warning the world spun so fast he felt dizzy and 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 study hall 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. Things were still moving too much in his head, and Mr. Vuga’s face was bright and red and greasy and kind of disgusting and just 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 surfing a little...” 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. “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 noise 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 made-in-some-third-world-toilet-sweatshop polyester Walmart 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. Don’t give yourself away! Be kool, act like nothing’s wrong! “You’re not smart enough to hang out with Switch. Why would you be stupid enough to even try going offNet?” Good question, now that Mr. Vuga’s harsh stare put things in perspective. He didn’t generally buy excuses, and right now Milan couldn’t think of one. He had netTranzed from the Pizza, which was not only strictly forbidden but also, due to firewalls, very difficult to do. That is, unless Audrey sent you some special fractals. And that, well, that was where the misunderstanding had occurred. Maybe Audrey was busy with her exam and not thinking. Maybe Milan hadn’t made it clear to Audrey that he was using a school eyeVid. Or she assumed he wouldn’t be stupid enough to go offNet while 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 suddenly felt uncomfortable. He knew that the penalty for going offNet 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.
 CHAPTER 2 Milan In School November 8, Thursday 11 A.M. Milan stood in front of his locker staring at the globe holo spinning round and round above his app. It was just after second period and he had given it another go. All morning he had been trying to get a hold of Dano. No connection pinpoint glowed. What’s going on? Why doesn’t he answer? This was the third day Dano hadn’t shown up anywhere. Yesterday had been Redcent day. They had made a date to go weeks ago, and Dano would never blow him off like that. Dano’s word was a matter of juice. Don’t say it if you don’t mean it. But yesterday afternoon Milan had waited for more than an hour at the Number 12 stop. No Dano. No explanation. No text, no Tweet, no Weibo, no message, no mail, no word, no nothing. 3.5 minutes. Milan extinguished his app and briefly crumpled the pliant device in his fist in disgust. Where is that math homework! Brainfart. We don’t have a test today, do we? Tomorrow. It’s tomorrow. Three minutes. Great, here comes Ascher. Don’t make eye contact! “Hey, Mildew, still using that crappy piece of junk? I’ll do you a favor and trash it.” Milan just managed to pull his app away as Ascher made a try to grab it. Jerk! I bet he’s recording this for Kiss My Ascher. Ascher was a “like” junky, a minor celebrity, and there was nothing he wouldn’t do to jack up ratings for his Kiss My Ascher YouTube show. You know, whatever your eyes see your chip can record. Ascher’s minor celebrity status guaranteed that he saw lots of eagerly grinding ass and enthusiastically bouncing tits, and, with the occasional practical joke thrown in (which was where Milan came in), it was enough to get shitloads of hits for Kiss My Ascher. In fact, the hits he got ran well into the upper six figures, and the vast majority consisted of likes. Yes, he was almost there, almost in the big time, in corporate marketing wet dream territory. This meant he got to do some consumer product endorsement and was showered with exclusive little gifts: wearable holos from Nike, TacoBell, whatever. On top of that his old man was loaded, so he had the absolute latest in quantum chips on his forehead, a Chonzin Paradise Ruby, in a Bulgari setting. Direct neural connections fast as lightning. Very kool, very showoff and very, very expensive. The only thing Ascher couldn’t sell was the fantasy he had of being Switch. Switch had to be earned. Switch was about popping tripTabs and neuroTranzing on hot-rodded quantum chips into deepFreak virtual netZones, melding mind directly into dataStreams for an in your face experience, a direct brain-to-net connection. But neuroTranzing in deepFreak could fry your mind. You had to know. That kind of knowing was what Switch was all about. Totally on and zoned, surf firewalls, hot-dog gates, rip through traps that could deadEnd you in a catatonic state forever, and then, if you find your way back out, you hope you’re still there, your mind still yours. Fly or fry they said, the only way to go when SIM and mind merge in the vast digital consciousness of the net. Switch knew they were the absolute kool fucking fuKool. To Switch, Ascher didn’t rate. In fact, he didn’t exist. Ascher shoved Milan into a locker and stared him down. “You’re ruining my view,” he whispered in what he thought was a tough voice. Ascher was in year ten, three years older than Milan. Milan wasn’t particularly athletic, tending instead toward the (only slightly, he told himself) plumpy. Still, he stood quite tall for his age and he unflinchingly returned the stare until Ascher, feigning disgust, let him go. “God, I hate filth,” Ascher sniffed as he walked off, cleaning his hands with a wetWipe. Milan slammed his locker shut. One minute. I can still make it! “PASSWORD!” the gargoyle intoned. The gargoyle always made Milan a little uneasy. Maybe it was the smoldering red eyes that stared straight into his and seemed to incinerate something way deep in his brain. Or maybe it was the really creepy leathery wings. Or a forked tongue that flickered in and out between sharp pointy vampire teeth. “HejnStem746. No, I mean 7446.” The gargoyle’s fiery eyes didn’t waver. The tongue flickered a few times. Why did the school mascot have to be this weird gargoyle? Why not something normal? Like maybe a cat, or a bear or even a river rat or a duck or something. “Sorry, sorry. I mean HejStem7446.” “YOU MAY ENTER!” The leathery wings spread and the gargoyle morphed into smoke and then vanished, its sharp glowing outline now an entrance portal. Milan passed through into the school’s virtual town square, officially known as SIM Square or the Hejn Center. It was a large square topped by a vast dark dome that was barely discernible high above the mists that glowed in school colours and lazily drifted overhead. A continuous colonnade enclosed the square, like an ideal Renaissance piazza, which is why the students referred to it as Pizza Square. Milan sat himself on a SIMbench and began thinking. He scanned to see if Dano had posted anywhere. It went without saying that Dano didn’t post much. He didn’t faceBook either, he was no faceFreak. SIMfacing and holoFacing weren’t juice, and definitely not deMode. Unfortunately, school firewalls prevented Milan from checking out any of the rad SIMlounges, the kind Dano might actually hang out in, such as myUncle’sPyjamas, the atLounge or the tangledFormat. After thinking and SIMsearching for a while, Milan concluded he had pretty much run out of options. Sure, it was no surprise that Dano didn’t do web. He was, after all, acknowledged as the gRazer. What was surprising was that the web wasn’t doing Dano. Milan knew that even the most committed offGrid gRazer couldn’t take himself offNet. You may be uninterested in the web, but you can’t stop it from being interested in you. Besides, nothing ever really disappears on the web, so there’s stuff buried somewhere about everyone. Like your third grade holo in Mrs. Parker’s class. Or the stupid vid you posted years ago and now you really wish you hadn’t. And even if you never posted, there’s a CCTV shot of you standing in line at the KandyKastle picking your nose. But this, this was creepy. This was impossible. This couldn’t happen. There was nothing. Nothing. This meant he needed Switch. Switch knew about this kind of thing. Luckily, Audrey was Switch, and she was good. Really good. Besides, Audrey was like a sister to Milan, and Dano’s oldest friend, so in any case she’d want to know. Milan sent Audrey a brief text: ‘dano missing 2 days, no hits on google.’ That was his first mistake, as he was still sitting in the Pizza. Nevertheless, much to his delight he received an answer from Audrey right away: ‘taking exam but took qwk look in google. u r right. try:
when you pass, code is:’
Kool! Fractal programs! Without stopping to think, Milan copyPasted the first fractal and waited. At first nothing happened. Then the shit hit the fan. Oh crap! Everything crashed and collapsed into an enormous pile of data rubble that began to turn white hot under the compression of it’s own information weight. Wow! This is like totally beyond amazing SIM! Way fuKool! Without warning Milan was thrust onto a fiber optic dataStream, a sensation like being whiplashed by a rocket sled or the rush down the first drop of a monster rollercoaster, his head spinning as he hurtled along. A second later a sudden halt stopped him instantly, a thousand to zero in zero. That kinda sucked! I’m feeling sick. Giddy, shaky, nauseated, disoriented, he stared at a blank dull grey steel firewall. It took a moment for his mind to stop moving and his stomach to settle to just a little queasy, and then he noticed the keypad. He figured he’d enter the passCode. It was painfully clear that Milan was no dataTraveller. Milan entered:
and immediately a small section of the steel wall dematerialized revealing a cubicle, like a safe, with a pile of documents in it. Milan reached for one but as he did suddenly and without warning the world spun so fast he felt dizzy and 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 study hall 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. Things were still moving too much in his head, and Mr. Vuga’s face was bright and red and greasy and kind of disgusting and just 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 surfing a little...” 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. “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 noise 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 made-in-some-third-world-toilet-sweatshop polyester Walmart 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. Don’t give yourself away! Be kool, act like nothing’s wrong! “You’re not smart enough to hang out with Switch. Why would you be stupid enough to even try going offNet?” Good question, now that Mr. Vuga’s harsh stare put things in perspective. He didn’t generally buy excuses, and right now Milan couldn’t think of one. He had netTranzed from the Pizza, which was not only strictly forbidden but also, due to firewalls, very difficult to do. That is, unless Audrey sent you some special fractals. And that, well, that was where the misunderstanding had occurred. Maybe Audrey was busy with her exam and not thinking. Maybe Milan hadn’t made it clear to Audrey that he was using a school eyeVid. Or she assumed he wouldn’t be stupid enough to go offNet while 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 suddenly felt uncomfortable. He knew that the penalty for going offNet 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.
 CHAPTER 2 Milan In School November 8, Thursday 11 A.M. Milan stood in front of his locker staring at the globe holo spinning round and round above his app. It was just after second period and he had given it another go. All morning he had been trying to get a hold of Dano. No connection pinpoint glowed. What’s going on? Why doesn’t he answer? This was the third day Dano hadn’t shown up anywhere. Yesterday had been Redcent day. They had made a date to go weeks ago, and Dano would never blow him off like that. Dano’s word was a matter of juice. Don’t say it if you don’t mean it. But yesterday afternoon Milan had waited for more than an hour at the Number 12 stop. No Dano. No explanation. No text, no Tweet, no Weibo, no message, no mail, no word, no nothing. 3.5 minutes. Milan extinguished his app and briefly crumpled the pliant device in his fist in disgust. Where is that math homework! Brainfart. We don’t have a test today, do we? Tomorrow. It’s tomorrow. Three minutes. Great, here comes Ascher. Don’t make eye contact! “Hey, Mildew, still using that crappy piece of junk? I’ll do you a favor and trash it.” Milan just managed to pull his app away as Ascher made a try to grab it. Jerk! I bet he’s recording this for Kiss My Ascher. Ascher was a “like” junky, a minor celebrity, and there was nothing he wouldn’t do to jack up ratings for his Kiss My Ascher YouTube show. You know, whatever your eyes see your chip can record. Ascher’s minor celebrity status guaranteed that he saw lots of eagerly grinding ass and enthusiastically bouncing tits, and, with the occasional practical joke thrown in (which was where Milan came in), it was enough to get shitloads of hits for Kiss My Ascher. In fact, the hits he got ran well into the upper six figures, and the vast majority consisted of likes. Yes, he was almost there, almost in the big time, in corporate marketing wet dream territory. This meant he got to do some consumer product endorsement and was showered with exclusive little gifts: wearable holos from Nike, TacoBell, whatever. On top of that his old man was loaded, so he had the absolute latest in quantum chips on his forehead, a Chonzin Paradise Ruby, in a Bulgari setting. Direct neural connections fast as lightning. Very kool, very showoff and very, very expensive. The only thing Ascher couldn’t sell was the fantasy he had of being Switch. Switch had to be earned. Switch was about popping tripTabs and neuroTranzing on hot-rodded quantum chips into deepFreak virtual netZones, melding mind directly into dataStreams for an in your face experience, a direct brain-to-net connection. But neuroTranzing in deepFreak could fry your mind. You had to know. That kind of knowing was what Switch was all about. Totally on and zoned, surf firewalls, hot-dog gates, rip through traps that could deadEnd you in a catatonic state forever, and then, if you find your way back out, you hope you’re still there, your mind still yours. Fly or fry they said, the only way to go when SIM and mind merge in the vast digital consciousness of the net. Switch knew they were the absolute kool fucking fuKool. To Switch, Ascher didn’t rate. In fact, he didn’t exist. Ascher shoved Milan into a locker and stared him down. “You’re ruining my view,” he whispered in what he thought was a tough voice. Ascher was in year ten, three years older than Milan. Milan wasn’t particularly athletic, tending instead toward the (only slightly, he told himself) plumpy. Still, he stood quite tall for his age and he unflinchingly returned the stare until Ascher, feigning disgust, let him go. “God, I hate filth,” Ascher sniffed as he walked off, cleaning his hands with a wetWipe. Milan slammed his locker shut. One minute. I can still make it! “PASSWORD!” the gargoyle intoned. The gargoyle always made Milan a little uneasy. Maybe it was the smoldering red eyes that stared straight into his and seemed to incinerate something way deep in his brain. Or maybe it was the really creepy leathery wings. Or a forked tongue that flickered in and out between sharp pointy vampire teeth. “HejnStem746. No, I mean 7446.” The gargoyle’s fiery eyes didn’t waver. The tongue flickered a few times. Why did the school mascot have to be this weird gargoyle? Why not something normal? Like maybe a cat, or a bear or even a river rat or a duck or something. “Sorry, sorry. I mean HejStem7446.” “YOU MAY ENTER!” The leathery wings spread and the gargoyle morphed into smoke and then vanished, its sharp glowing outline now an entrance portal. Milan passed through into the school’s virtual town square, officially known as SIM Square or the Hejn Center. It was a large square topped by a vast dark dome that was barely discernible high above the mists that glowed in school colours and lazily drifted overhead. A continuous colonnade enclosed the square, like an ideal Renaissance piazza, which is why the students referred to it as Pizza Square. Milan sat himself on a SIMbench and began thinking. He scanned to see if Dano had posted anywhere. It went without saying that Dano didn’t post much. He didn’t faceBook either, he was no faceFreak. SIMfacing and holoFacing weren’t juice, and definitely not deMode. Unfortunately, school firewalls prevented Milan from checking out any of the rad SIMlounges, the kind Dano might actually hang out in, such as myUncle’sPyjamas, the atLounge or the tangledFormat. After thinking and SIMsearching for a while, Milan concluded he had pretty much run out of options. Sure, it was no surprise that Dano didn’t do web. He was, after all, acknowledged as the gRazer. What was surprising was that the web wasn’t doing Dano. Milan knew that even the most committed offGrid gRazer couldn’t take himself offNet. You may be uninterested in the web, but you can’t stop it from being interested in you. Besides, nothing ever really disappears on the web, so there’s stuff buried somewhere about everyone. Like your third grade holo in Mrs. Parker’s class. Or the stupid vid you posted years ago and now you really wish you hadn’t. And even if you never posted, there’s a CCTV shot of you standing in line at the KandyKastle picking your nose. But this, this was creepy. This was impossible. This couldn’t happen. There was nothing. Nothing. This meant he needed Switch. Switch knew about this kind of thing. Luckily, Audrey was Switch, and she was good. Really good. Besides, Audrey was like a sister to Milan, and Dano’s oldest friend, so in any case she’d want to know. Milan sent Audrey a brief text: ‘dano missing 2 days, no hits on google.’ That was his first mistake, as he was still sitting in the Pizza. Nevertheless, much to his delight he received an answer from Audrey right away: ‘taking exam but took qwk look in google. u r right. try:
when you pass, code is:’
Kool! Fractal programs! Without stopping to think, Milan copyPasted the first fractal and waited. At first nothing happened. Then the shit hit the fan. Oh crap! Everything crashed and collapsed into an enormous pile of data rubble that began to turn white hot under the compression of it’s own information weight. Wow! This is like totally beyond amazing SIM! Way fuKool! Without warning Milan was thrust onto a fiber optic dataStream, a sensation like being whiplashed by a rocket sled or the rush down the first drop of a monster rollercoaster, his head spinning as he hurtled along. A second later a sudden halt stopped him instantly, a thousand to zero in zero. That kinda sucked! I’m feeling sick. Giddy, shaky, nauseated, disoriented, he stared at a blank dull grey steel firewall. It took a moment for his mind to stop moving and his stomach to settle to just a little queasy, and then he noticed the keypad. He figured he’d enter the passCode. It was painfully clear that Milan was no dataTraveller. Milan entered:
and immediately a small section of the steel wall dematerialized revealing a cubicle, like a safe, with a pile of documents in it. Milan reached for one but as he did suddenly and without warning the world spun so fast he felt dizzy and 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 study hall 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. Things were still moving too much in his head, and Mr. Vuga’s face was bright and red and greasy and kind of disgusting and just 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 surfing a little...” 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. “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 noise 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 made-in-some-third-world-toilet-sweatshop polyester Walmart 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. Don’t give yourself away! Be kool, act like nothing’s wrong! “You’re not smart enough to hang out with Switch. Why would you be stupid enough to even try going offNet?” Good question, now that Mr. Vuga’s harsh stare put things in perspective. He didn’t generally buy excuses, and right now Milan couldn’t think of one. He had netTranzed from the Pizza, which was not only strictly forbidden but also, due to firewalls, very difficult to do. That is, unless Audrey sent you some special fractals. And that, well, that was where the misunderstanding had occurred. Maybe Audrey was busy with her exam and not thinking. Maybe Milan hadn’t made it clear to Audrey that he was using a school eyeVid. Or she assumed he wouldn’t be stupid enough to go offNet while 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 suddenly felt uncomfortable. He knew that the penalty for going offNet 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.
 CHAPTER 2 Milan In School November 8, Thursday 11 A.M. Milan stood in front of his locker staring at the globe holo spinning round and round above his app. It was just after second period and he had given it another go. All morning he had been trying to get a hold of Dano. No connection pinpoint glowed. What’s going on? Why doesn’t he answer? This was the third day Dano hadn’t shown up anywhere. Yesterday had been Redcent day. They had made a date to go weeks ago, and Dano would never blow him off like that. Dano’s word was a matter of juice. Don’t say it if you don’t mean it. But yesterday afternoon Milan had waited for more than an hour at the Number 12 stop. No Dano. No explanation. No text, no Tweet, no Weibo, no message, no mail, no word, no nothing. 3.5 minutes. Milan extinguished his app and briefly crumpled the pliant device in his fist in disgust. Where is that math homework! Brainfart. We don’t have a test today, do we? Tomorrow. It’s tomorrow. Three minutes. Great, here comes Ascher. Don’t make eye contact! “Hey, Mildew, still using that crappy piece of junk? I’ll do you a favor and trash it.” Milan just managed to pull his app away as Ascher made a try to grab it. Jerk! I bet he’s recording this for Kiss My Ascher. Ascher was a “like” junky, a minor celebrity, and there was nothing he wouldn’t do to jack up ratings for his Kiss My Ascher YouTube show. You know, whatever your eyes see your chip can record. Ascher’s minor celebrity status guaranteed that he saw lots of eagerly grinding ass and enthusiastically bouncing tits, and, with the occasional practical joke thrown in (which was where Milan came in), it was enough to get shitloads of hits for Kiss My Ascher. In fact, the hits he got ran well into the upper six figures, and the vast majority consisted of likes. Yes, he was almost there, almost in the big time, in corporate marketing wet dream territory. This meant he got to do some consumer product endorsement and was showered with exclusive little gifts: wearable holos from Nike, TacoBell, whatever. On top of that his old man was loaded, so he had the absolute latest in quantum chips on his forehead, a Chonzin Paradise Ruby, in a Bulgari setting. Direct neural connections fast as lightning. Very kool, very showoff and very, very expensive. The only thing Ascher couldn’t sell was the fantasy he had of being Switch. Switch had to be earned. Switch was about popping tripTabs and neuroTranzing on hot-rodded quantum chips into deepFreak virtual netZones, melding mind directly into dataStreams for an in your face experience, a direct brain-to-net connection. But neuroTranzing in deepFreak could fry your mind. You had to know. That kind of knowing was what Switch was all about. Totally on and zoned, surf firewalls, hot-dog gates, rip through traps that could deadEnd you in a catatonic state forever, and then, if you find your way back out, you hope you’re still there, your mind still yours. Fly or fry they said, the only way to go when SIM and mind merge in the vast digital consciousness of the net. Switch knew they were the absolute kool fucking fuKool. To Switch, Ascher didn’t rate. In fact, he didn’t exist. Ascher shoved Milan into a locker and stared him down. “You’re ruining my view,” he whispered in what he thought was a tough voice. Ascher was in year ten, three years older than Milan. Milan wasn’t particularly athletic, tending instead toward the (only slightly, he told himself) plumpy. Still, he stood quite tall for his age and he unflinchingly returned the stare until Ascher, feigning disgust, let him go. “God, I hate filth,” Ascher sniffed as he walked off, cleaning his hands with a wetWipe. Milan slammed his locker shut. One minute. I can still make it! “PASSWORD!” the gargoyle intoned. The gargoyle always made Milan a little uneasy. Maybe it was the smoldering red eyes that stared straight into his and seemed to incinerate something way deep in his brain. Or maybe it was the really creepy leathery wings. Or a forked tongue that flickered in and out between sharp pointy vampire teeth. “HejnStem746. No, I mean 7446.” The gargoyle’s fiery eyes didn’t waver. The tongue flickered a few times. Why did the school mascot have to be this weird gargoyle? Why not something normal? Like maybe a cat, or a bear or even a river rat or a duck or something. “Sorry, sorry. I mean HejStem7446.” “YOU MAY ENTER!” The leathery wings spread and the gargoyle morphed into smoke and then vanished, its sharp glowing outline now an entrance portal. Milan passed through into the school’s virtual town square, officially known as SIM Square or the Hejn Center. It was a large square topped by a vast dark dome that was barely discernible high above the mists that glowed in school colours and lazily drifted overhead. A continuous colonnade enclosed the square, like an ideal Renaissance piazza, which is why the students referred to it as Pizza Square. Milan sat himself on a SIMbench and began thinking. He scanned to see if Dano had posted anywhere. It went without saying that Dano didn’t post much. He didn’t faceBook either, he was no faceFreak. SIMfacing and holoFacing weren’t juice, and definitely not deMode. Unfortunately, school firewalls prevented Milan from checking out any of the rad SIMlounges, the kind Dano might actually hang out in, such as myUncle’sPyjamas, the atLounge or the tangledFormat. After thinking and SIMsearching for a while, Milan concluded he had pretty much run out of options. Sure, it was no surprise that Dano didn’t do web. He was, after all, acknowledged as the gRazer. What was surprising was that the web wasn’t doing Dano. Milan knew that even the most committed offGrid gRazer couldn’t take himself offNet. You may be uninterested in the web, but you can’t stop it from being interested in you. Besides, nothing ever really disappears on the web, so there’s stuff buried somewhere about everyone. Like your third grade holo in Mrs. Parker’s class. Or the stupid vid you posted years ago and now you really wish you hadn’t. And even if you never posted, there’s a CCTV shot of you standing in line at the KandyKastle picking your nose. But this, this was creepy. This was impossible. This couldn’t happen. There was nothing. Nothing. This meant he needed Switch. Switch knew about this kind of thing. Luckily, Audrey was Switch, and she was good. Really good. Besides, Audrey was like a sister to Milan, and Dano’s oldest friend, so in any case she’d want to know. Milan sent Audrey a brief text: ‘dano missing 2 days, no hits on google.’ That was his first mistake, as he was still sitting in the Pizza. Nevertheless, much to his delight he received an answer from Audrey right away: ‘taking exam but took qwk look in google. u r right. try:
when you pass, code is:’
Kool! Fractal programs! Without stopping to think, Milan copyPasted the first fractal and waited. At first nothing happened. Then the shit hit the fan. Oh crap! Everything crashed and collapsed into an enormous pile of data rubble that began to turn white hot under the compression of it’s own information weight. Wow! This is like totally beyond amazing SIM! Way fuKool! Without warning Milan was thrust onto a fiber optic dataStream, a sensation like being whiplashed by a rocket sled or the rush down the first drop of a monster rollercoaster, his head spinning as he hurtled along. A second later a sudden halt stopped him instantly, a thousand to zero in zero. That kinda sucked! I’m feeling sick. Giddy, shaky, nauseated, disoriented, he stared at a blank dull grey steel firewall. It took a moment for his mind to stop moving and his stomach to settle to just a little queasy, and then he noticed the keypad. He figured he’d enter the passCode. It was painfully clear that Milan was no dataTraveller. Milan entered:
and immediately a small section of the steel wall dematerialized revealing a cubicle, like a safe, with a pile of documents in it. Milan reached for one but as he did suddenly and without warning the world spun so fast he felt dizzy and 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 study hall 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. Things were still moving too much in his head, and Mr. Vuga’s face was bright and red and greasy and kind of disgusting and just 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 surfing a little...” 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. “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 noise 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 made-in-some-third-world-toilet-sweatshop polyester Walmart 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. Don’t give yourself away! Be kool, act like nothing’s wrong! “You’re not smart enough to hang out with Switch. Why would you be stupid enough to even try going offNet?” Good question, now that Mr. Vuga’s harsh stare put things in perspective. He didn’t generally buy excuses, and right now Milan couldn’t think of one. He had netTranzed from the Pizza, which was not only strictly forbidden but also, due to firewalls, very difficult to do. That is, unless Audrey sent you some special fractals. And that, well, that was where the misunderstanding had occurred. Maybe Audrey was busy with her exam and not thinking. Maybe Milan hadn’t made it clear to Audrey that he was using a school eyeVid. Or she assumed he wouldn’t be stupid enough to go offNet while 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 suddenly felt uncomfortable. He knew that the penalty for going offNet 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.
 CHAPTER 2 Milan In School November 8, Thursday 11 A.M. Milan stood in front of his locker staring at the globe holo spinning round and round above his app. It was just after second period and he had given it another go. All morning he had been trying to get a hold of Dano. No connection pinpoint glowed. What’s going on? Why doesn’t he answer? This was the third day Dano hadn’t shown up anywhere. Yesterday had been Redcent day. They had made a date to go weeks ago, and Dano would never blow him off like that. Dano’s word was a matter of juice. Don’t say it if you don’t mean it. But yesterday afternoon Milan had waited for more than an hour at the Number 12 stop. No Dano. No explanation. No text, no Tweet, no Weibo, no message, no mail, no word, no nothing. 3.5 minutes. Milan extinguished his app and briefly crumpled the pliant device in his fist in disgust. Where is that math homework! Brainfart. We don’t have a test today, do we? Tomorrow. It’s tomorrow. Three minutes. Great, here comes Ascher. Don’t make eye contact! “Hey, Mildew, still using that crappy piece of junk? I’ll do you a favor and trash it.” Milan just managed to pull his app away as Ascher made a try to grab it. Jerk! I bet he’s recording this for Kiss My Ascher. Ascher was a “like” junky, a minor celebrity, and there was nothing he wouldn’t do to jack up ratings for his Kiss My Ascher YouTube show. You know, whatever your eyes see your chip can record. Ascher’s minor celebrity status guaranteed that he saw lots of eagerly grinding ass and enthusiastically bouncing tits, and, with the occasional practical joke thrown in (which was where Milan came in), it was enough to get shitloads of hits for Kiss My Ascher. In fact, the hits he got ran well into the upper six figures, and the vast majority consisted of likes. Yes, he was almost there, almost in the big time, in corporate marketing wet dream territory. This meant he got to do some consumer product endorsement and was showered with exclusive little gifts: wearable holos from Nike, TacoBell, whatever. On top of that his old man was loaded, so he had the absolute latest in quantum chips on his forehead, a Chonzin Paradise Ruby, in a Bulgari setting. Direct neural connections fast as lightning. Very kool, very showoff and very, very expensive. The only thing Ascher couldn’t sell was the fantasy he had of being Switch. Switch had to be earned. Switch was about popping tripTabs and neuroTranzing on hot-rodded quantum chips into deepFreak virtual netZones, melding mind directly into dataStreams for an in your face experience, a direct brain-to-net connection. But neuroTranzing in deepFreak could fry your mind. You had to know. That kind of knowing was what Switch was all about. Totally on and zoned, surf firewalls, hot-dog gates, rip through traps that could deadEnd you in a catatonic state forever, and then, if you find your way back out, you hope you’re still there, your mind still yours. Fly or fry they said, the only way to go when SIM and mind merge in the vast digital consciousness of the net. Switch knew they were the absolute kool fucking fuKool. To Switch, Ascher didn’t rate. In fact, he didn’t exist. Ascher shoved Milan into a locker and stared him down. “You’re ruining my view,” he whispered in what he thought was a tough voice. Ascher was in year ten, three years older than Milan. Milan wasn’t particularly athletic, tending instead toward the (only slightly, he told himself) plumpy. Still, he stood quite tall for his age and he unflinchingly returned the stare until Ascher, feigning disgust, let him go. “God, I hate filth,” Ascher sniffed as he walked off, cleaning his hands with a wetWipe. Milan slammed his locker shut. One minute. I can still make it! “PASSWORD!” the gargoyle intoned. The gargoyle always made Milan a little uneasy. Maybe it was the smoldering red eyes that stared straight into his and seemed to incinerate something way deep in his brain. Or maybe it was the really creepy leathery wings. Or a forked tongue that flickered in and out between sharp pointy vampire teeth. “HejnStem746. No, I mean 7446.” The gargoyle’s fiery eyes didn’t waver. The tongue flickered a few times. Why did the school mascot have to be this weird gargoyle? Why not something normal? Like maybe a cat, or a bear or even a river rat or a duck or something. “Sorry, sorry. I mean HejStem7446.” “YOU MAY ENTER!” The leathery wings spread and the gargoyle morphed into smoke and then vanished, its sharp glowing outline now an entrance portal. Milan passed through into the school’s virtual town square, officially known as SIM Square or the Hejn Center. It was a large square topped by a vast dark dome that was barely discernible high above the mists that glowed in school colours and lazily drifted overhead. A continuous colonnade enclosed the square, like an ideal Renaissance piazza, which is why the students referred to it as Pizza Square. Milan sat himself on a SIMbench and began thinking. He scanned to see if Dano had posted anywhere. It went without saying that Dano didn’t post much. He didn’t faceBook either, he was no faceFreak. SIMfacing and holoFacing weren’t juice, and definitely not deMode. Unfortunately, school firewalls prevented Milan from checking out any of the rad SIMlounges, the kind Dano might actually hang out in, such as myUncle’sPyjamas, the atLounge or the tangledFormat. After thinking and SIMsearching for a while, Milan concluded he had pretty much run out of options. Sure, it was no surprise that Dano didn’t do web. He was, after all, acknowledged as the gRazer. What was surprising was that the web wasn’t doing Dano. Milan knew that even the most committed offGrid gRazer couldn’t take himself offNet. You may be uninterested in the web, but you can’t stop it from being interested in you. Besides, nothing ever really disappears on the web, so there’s stuff buried somewhere about everyone. Like your third grade holo in Mrs. Parker’s class. Or the stupid vid you posted years ago and now you really wish you hadn’t. And even if you never posted, there’s a CCTV shot of you standing in line at the KandyKastle picking your nose. But this, this was creepy. This was impossible. This couldn’t happen. There was nothing. Nothing. This meant he needed Switch. Switch knew about this kind of thing. Luckily, Audrey was Switch, and she was good. Really good. Besides, Audrey was like a sister to Milan, and Dano’s oldest friend, so in any case she’d want to know. Milan sent Audrey a brief text: ‘dano missing 2 days, no hits on google.’ That was his first mistake, as he was still sitting in the Pizza. Nevertheless, much to his delight he received an answer from Audrey right away: ‘taking exam but took qwk look in google. u r right. try:
when you pass, code is:’
Kool! Fractal programs! Without stopping to think, Milan copyPasted the first fractal and waited. At first nothing happened. Then the shit hit the fan. Oh crap! Everything crashed and collapsed into an enormous pile of data rubble that began to turn white hot under the compression of it’s own information weight. Wow! This is like totally beyond amazing SIM! Way fuKool! Without warning Milan was thrust onto a fiber optic dataStream, a sensation like being whiplashed by a rocket sled or the rush down the first drop of a monster rollercoaster, his head spinning as he hurtled along. A second later a sudden halt stopped him instantly, a thousand to zero in zero. That kinda sucked! I’m feeling sick. Giddy, shaky, nauseated, disoriented, he stared at a blank dull grey steel firewall. It took a moment for his mind to stop moving and his stomach to settle to just a little queasy, and then he noticed the keypad. He figured he’d enter the passCode. It was painfully clear that Milan was no dataTraveller. Milan entered:
and immediately a small section of the steel wall dematerialized revealing a cubicle, like a safe, with a pile of documents in it. Milan reached for one but as he did suddenly and without warning the world spun so fast he felt dizzy and 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 study hall 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. Things were still moving too much in his head, and Mr. Vuga’s face was bright and red and greasy and kind of disgusting and just 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 surfing a little...” 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. “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 noise 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 made-in-some-third-world-toilet-sweatshop polyester Walmart 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. Don’t give yourself away! Be kool, act like nothing’s wrong! “You’re not smart enough to hang out with Switch. Why would you be stupid enough to even try going offNet?” Good question, now that Mr. Vuga’s harsh stare put things in perspective. He didn’t generally buy excuses, and right now Milan couldn’t think of one. He had netTranzed from the Pizza, which was not only strictly forbidden but also, due to firewalls, very difficult to do. That is, unless Audrey sent you some special fractals. And that, well, that was where the misunderstanding had occurred. Maybe Audrey was busy with her exam and not thinking. Maybe Milan hadn’t made it clear to Audrey that he was using a school eyeVid. Or she assumed he wouldn’t be stupid enough to go offNet while 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 suddenly felt uncomfortable. He knew that the penalty for going offNet 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.
 CHAPTER 2 Milan In School November 8, Thursday 11 A.M. Milan stood in front of his locker staring at the globe holo spinning round and round above his app. It was just after second period and he had given it another go. All morning he had been trying to get a hold of Dano. No connection pinpoint glowed. What’s going on? Why doesn’t he answer? This was the third day Dano hadn’t shown up anywhere. Yesterday had been Redcent day. They had made a date to go weeks ago, and Dano would never blow him off like that. Dano’s word was a matter of juice. Don’t say it if you don’t mean it. But yesterday afternoon Milan had waited for more than an hour at the Number 12 stop. No Dano. No explanation. No text, no Tweet, no Weibo, no message, no mail, no word, no nothing. 3.5 minutes. Milan extinguished his app and briefly crumpled the pliant device in his fist in disgust. Where is that math homework! Brainfart. We don’t have a test today, do we? Tomorrow. It’s tomorrow. Three minutes. Great, here comes Ascher. Don’t make eye contact! “Hey, Mildew, still using that crappy piece of junk? I’ll do you a favor and trash it.” Milan just managed to pull his app away as Ascher made a try to grab it. Jerk! I bet he’s recording this for Kiss My Ascher. Ascher was a “like” junky, a minor celebrity, and there was nothing he wouldn’t do to jack up ratings for his Kiss My Ascher YouTube show. You know, whatever your eyes see your chip can record. Ascher’s minor celebrity status guaranteed that he saw lots of eagerly grinding ass and enthusiastically bouncing tits, and, with the occasional practical joke thrown in (which was where Milan came in), it was enough to get shitloads of hits for Kiss My Ascher. In fact, the hits he got ran well into the upper six figures, and the vast majority consisted of likes. Yes, he was almost there, almost in the big time, in corporate marketing wet dream territory. This meant he got to do some consumer product endorsement and was showered with exclusive little gifts: wearable holos from Nike, TacoBell, whatever. On top of that his old man was loaded, so he had the absolute latest in quantum chips on his forehead, a Chonzin Paradise Ruby, in a Bulgari setting. Direct neural connections fast as lightning. Very kool, very showoff and very, very expensive. The only thing Ascher couldn’t sell was the fantasy he had of being Switch. Switch had to be earned. Switch was about popping tripTabs and neuroTranzing on hot-rodded quantum chips into deepFreak virtual netZones, melding mind directly into dataStreams for an in your face experience, a direct brain-to-net connection. But neuroTranzing in deepFreak could fry your mind. You had to know. That kind of knowing was what Switch was all about. Totally on and zoned, surf firewalls, hot-dog gates, rip through traps that could deadEnd you in a catatonic state forever, and then, if you find your way back out, you hope you’re still there, your mind still yours. Fly or fry they said, the only way to go when SIM and mind merge in the vast digital consciousness of the net. Switch knew they were the absolute kool fucking fuKool. To Switch, Ascher didn’t rate. In fact, he didn’t exist. Ascher shoved Milan into a locker and stared him down. “You’re ruining my view,” he whispered in what he thought was a tough voice. Ascher was in year ten, three years older than Milan. Milan wasn’t particularly athletic, tending instead toward the (only slightly, he told himself) plumpy. Still, he stood quite tall for his age and he unflinchingly returned the stare until Ascher, feigning disgust, let him go. “God, I hate filth,” Ascher sniffed as he walked off, cleaning his hands with a wetWipe. Milan slammed his locker shut. One minute. I can still make it! “PASSWORD!” the gargoyle intoned. The gargoyle always made Milan a little uneasy. Maybe it was the smoldering red eyes that stared straight into his and seemed to incinerate something way deep in his brain. Or maybe it was the really creepy leathery wings. Or a forked tongue that flickered in and out between sharp pointy vampire teeth. “HejnStem746. No, I mean 7446.” The gargoyle’s fiery eyes didn’t waver. The tongue flickered a few times. Why did the school mascot have to be this weird gargoyle? Why not something normal? Like maybe a cat, or a bear or even a river rat or a duck or something. “Sorry, sorry. I mean HejStem7446.” “YOU MAY ENTER!” The leathery wings spread and the gargoyle morphed into smoke and then vanished, its sharp glowing outline now an entrance portal. Milan passed through into the school’s virtual town square, officially known as SIM Square or the Hejn Center. It was a large square topped by a vast dark dome that was barely discernible high above the mists that glowed in school colours and lazily drifted overhead. A continuous colonnade enclosed the square, like an ideal Renaissance piazza, which is why the students referred to it as Pizza Square. Milan sat himself on a SIMbench and began thinking. He scanned to see if Dano had posted anywhere. It went without saying that Dano didn’t post much. He didn’t faceBook either, he was no faceFreak. SIMfacing and holoFacing weren’t juice, and definitely not deMode. Unfortunately, school firewalls prevented Milan from checking out any of the rad SIMlounges, the kind Dano might actually hang out in, such as myUncle’sPyjamas, the atLounge or the tangledFormat. After thinking and SIMsearching for a while, Milan concluded he had pretty much run out of options. Sure, it was no surprise that Dano didn’t do web. He was, after all, acknowledged as the gRazer. What was surprising was that the web wasn’t doing Dano. Milan knew that even the most committed offGrid gRazer couldn’t take himself offNet. You may be uninterested in the web, but you can’t stop it from being interested in you. Besides, nothing ever really disappears on the web, so there’s stuff buried somewhere about everyone. Like your third grade holo in Mrs. Parker’s class. Or the stupid vid you posted years ago and now you really wish you hadn’t. And even if you never posted, there’s a CCTV shot of you standing in line at the KandyKastle picking your nose. But this, this was creepy. This was impossible. This couldn’t happen. There was nothing. Nothing. This meant he needed Switch. Switch knew about this kind of thing. Luckily, Audrey was Switch, and she was good. Really good. Besides, Audrey was like a sister to Milan, and Dano’s oldest friend, so in any case she’d want to know. Milan sent Audrey a brief text: ‘dano missing 2 days, no hits on google.’ That was his first mistake, as he was still sitting in the Pizza. Nevertheless, much to his delight he received an answer from Audrey right away: ‘taking exam but took qwk look in google. u r right. try:
when you pass, code is:’
Kool! Fractal programs! Without stopping to think, Milan copyPasted the first fractal and waited. At first nothing happened. Then the shit hit the fan. Oh crap! Everything crashed and collapsed into an enormous pile of data rubble that began to turn white hot under the compression of it’s own information weight. Wow! This is like totally beyond amazing SIM! Way fuKool! Without warning Milan was thrust onto a fiber optic dataStream, a sensation like being whiplashed by a rocket sled or the rush down the first drop of a monster rollercoaster, his head spinning as he hurtled along. A second later a sudden halt stopped him instantly, a thousand to zero in zero. That kinda sucked! I’m feeling sick. Giddy, shaky, nauseated, disoriented, he stared at a blank dull grey steel firewall. It took a moment for his mind to stop moving and his stomach to settle to just a little queasy, and then he noticed the keypad. He figured he’d enter the passCode. It was painfully clear that Milan was no dataTraveller. Milan entered:
and immediately a small section of the steel wall dematerialized revealing a cubicle, like a safe, with a pile of documents in it. Milan reached for one but as he did suddenly and without warning the world spun so fast he felt dizzy and 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 study hall 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. Things were still moving too much in his head, and Mr. Vuga’s face was bright and red and greasy and kind of disgusting and just 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 surfing a little...” 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. “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 noise 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 made-in-some-third-world-toilet-sweatshop polyester Walmart 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. Don’t give yourself away! Be kool, act like nothing’s wrong! “You’re not smart enough to hang out with Switch. Why would you be stupid enough to even try going offNet?” Good question, now that Mr. Vuga’s harsh stare put things in perspective. He didn’t generally buy excuses, and right now Milan couldn’t think of one. He had netTranzed from the Pizza, which was not only strictly forbidden but also, due to firewalls, very difficult to do. That is, unless Audrey sent you some special fractals. And that, well, that was where the misunderstanding had occurred. Maybe Audrey was busy with her exam and not thinking. Maybe Milan hadn’t made it clear to Audrey that he was using a school eyeVid. Or she assumed he wouldn’t be stupid enough to go offNet while 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 suddenly felt uncomfortable. He knew that the penalty for going offNet 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.
 CHAPTER 2 Milan In School November 8, Thursday 11 A.M. Milan stood in front of his locker staring at the globe holo spinning round and round above his app. It was just after second period and he had given it another go. All morning he had been trying to get a hold of Dano. No connection pinpoint glowed. What’s going on? Why doesn’t he answer? This was the third day Dano hadn’t shown up anywhere. Yesterday had been Redcent day. They had made a date to go weeks ago, and Dano would never blow him off like that. Dano’s word was a matter of juice. Don’t say it if you don’t mean it. But yesterday afternoon Milan had waited for more than an hour at the Number 12 stop. No Dano. No explanation. No text, no Tweet, no Weibo, no message, no mail, no word, no nothing. 3.5 minutes. Milan extinguished his app and briefly crumpled the pliant device in his fist in disgust. Where is that math homework! Brainfart. We don’t have a test today, do we? Tomorrow. It’s tomorrow. Three minutes. Great, here comes Ascher. Don’t make eye contact! “Hey, Mildew, still using that crappy piece of junk? I’ll do you a favor and trash it.” Milan just managed to pull his app away as Ascher made a try to grab it. Jerk! I bet he’s recording this for Kiss My Ascher. Ascher was a “like” junky, a minor celebrity, and there was nothing he wouldn’t do to jack up ratings for his Kiss My Ascher YouTube show. You know, whatever your eyes see your chip can record. Ascher’s minor celebrity status guaranteed that he saw lots of eagerly grinding ass and enthusiastically bouncing tits, and, with the occasional practical joke thrown in (which was where Milan came in), it was enough to get shitloads of hits for Kiss My Ascher. In fact, the hits he got ran well into the upper six figures, and the vast majority consisted of likes. Yes, he was almost there, almost in the big time, in corporate marketing wet dream territory. This meant he got to do some consumer product endorsement and was showered with exclusive little gifts: wearable holos from Nike, TacoBell, whatever. On top of that his old man was loaded, so he had the absolute latest in quantum chips on his forehead, a Chonzin Paradise Ruby, in a Bulgari setting. Direct neural connections fast as lightning. Very kool, very showoff and very, very expensive. The only thing Ascher couldn’t sell was the fantasy he had of being Switch. Switch had to be earned. Switch was about popping tripTabs and neuroTranzing on hot-rodded quantum chips into deepFreak virtual netZones, melding mind directly into dataStreams for an in your face experience, a direct brain-to-net connection. But neuroTranzing in deepFreak could fry your mind. You had to know. That kind of knowing was what Switch was all about. Totally on and zoned, surf firewalls, hot-dog gates, rip through traps that could deadEnd you in a catatonic state forever, and then, if you find your way back out, you hope you’re still there, your mind still yours. Fly or fry they said, the only way to go when SIM and mind merge in the vast digital consciousness of the net. Switch knew they were the absolute kool fucking fuKool. To Switch, Ascher didn’t rate. In fact, he didn’t exist. Ascher shoved Milan into a locker and stared him down. “You’re ruining my view,” he whispered in what he thought was a tough voice. Ascher was in year ten, three years older than Milan. Milan wasn’t particularly athletic, tending instead toward the (only slightly, he told himself) plumpy. Still, he stood quite tall for his age and he unflinchingly returned the stare until Ascher, feigning disgust, let him go. “God, I hate filth,” Ascher sniffed as he walked off, cleaning his hands with a wetWipe. Milan slammed his locker shut. One minute. I can still make it! “PASSWORD!” the gargoyle intoned. The gargoyle always made Milan a little uneasy. Maybe it was the smoldering red eyes that stared straight into his and seemed to incinerate something way deep in his brain. Or maybe it was the really creepy leathery wings. Or a forked tongue that flickered in and out between sharp pointy vampire teeth. “HejnStem746. No, I mean 7446.” The gargoyle’s fiery eyes didn’t waver. The tongue flickered a few times. Why did the school mascot have to be this weird gargoyle? Why not something normal? Like maybe a cat, or a bear or even a river rat or a duck or something. “Sorry, sorry. I mean HejStem7446.” “YOU MAY ENTER!” The leathery wings spread and the gargoyle morphed into smoke and then vanished, its sharp glowing outline now an entrance portal. Milan passed through into the school’s virtual town square, officially known as SIM Square or the Hejn Center. It was a large square topped by a vast dark dome that was barely discernible high above the mists that glowed in school colours and lazily drifted overhead. A continuous colonnade enclosed the square, like an ideal Renaissance piazza, which is why the students referred to it as Pizza Square. Milan sat himself on a SIMbench and began thinking. He scanned to see if Dano had posted anywhere. It went without saying that Dano didn’t post much. He didn’t faceBook either, he was no faceFreak. SIMfacing and holoFacing weren’t juice, and definitely not deMode. Unfortunately, school firewalls prevented Milan from checking out any of the rad SIMlounges, the kind Dano might actually hang out in, such as myUncle’sPyjamas, the atLounge or the tangledFormat. After thinking and SIMsearching for a while, Milan concluded he had pretty much run out of options. Sure, it was no surprise that Dano didn’t do web. He was, after all, acknowledged as the gRazer. What was surprising was that the web wasn’t doing Dano. Milan knew that even the most committed offGrid gRazer couldn’t take himself offNet. You may be uninterested in the web, but you can’t stop it from being interested in you. Besides, nothing ever really disappears on the web, so there’s stuff buried somewhere about everyone. Like your third grade holo in Mrs. Parker’s class. Or the stupid vid you posted years ago and now you really wish you hadn’t. And even if you never posted, there’s a CCTV shot of you standing in line at the KandyKastle picking your nose. But this, this was creepy. This was impossible. This couldn’t happen. There was nothing. Nothing. This meant he needed Switch. Switch knew about this kind of thing. Luckily, Audrey was Switch, and she was good. Really good. Besides, Audrey was like a sister to Milan, and Dano’s oldest friend, so in any case she’d want to know. Milan sent Audrey a brief text: ‘dano missing 2 days, no hits on google.’ That was his first mistake, as he was still sitting in the Pizza. Nevertheless, much to his delight he received an answer from Audrey right away: ‘taking exam but took qwk look in google. u r right. try:
when you pass, code is:’
Kool! Fractal programs! Without stopping to think, Milan copyPasted the first fractal and waited. At first nothing happened. Then the shit hit the fan. Oh crap! Everything crashed and collapsed into an enormous pile of data rubble that began to turn white hot under the compression of it’s own information weight. Wow! This is like totally beyond amazing SIM! Way fuKool! Without warning Milan was thrust onto a fiber optic dataStream, a sensation like being whiplashed by a rocket sled or the rush down the first drop of a monster rollercoaster, his head spinning as he hurtled along. A second later a sudden halt stopped him instantly, a thousand to zero in zero. That kinda sucked! I’m feeling sick. Giddy, shaky, nauseated, disoriented, he stared at a blank dull grey steel firewall. It took a moment for his mind to stop moving and his stomach to settle to just a little queasy, and then he noticed the keypad. He figured he’d enter the passCode. It was painfully clear that Milan was no dataTraveller. Milan entered:
and immediately a small section of the steel wall dematerialized revealing a cubicle, like a safe, with a pile of documents in it. Milan reached for one but as he did suddenly and without warning the world spun so fast he felt dizzy and 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 study hall 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. Things were still moving too much in his head, and Mr. Vuga’s face was bright and red and greasy and kind of disgusting and just 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 surfing a little...” 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. “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 noise 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 made-in-some-third-world-toilet-sweatshop polyester Walmart 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. Don’t give yourself away! Be kool, act like nothing’s wrong! “You’re not smart enough to hang out with Switch. Why would you be stupid enough to even try going offNet?” Good question, now that Mr. Vuga’s harsh stare put things in perspective. He didn’t generally buy excuses, and right now Milan couldn’t think of one. He had netTranzed from the Pizza, which was not only strictly forbidden but also, due to firewalls, very difficult to do. That is, unless Audrey sent you some special fractals. And that, well, that was where the misunderstanding had occurred. Maybe Audrey was busy with her exam and not thinking. Maybe Milan hadn’t made it clear to Audrey that he was using a school eyeVid. Or she assumed he wouldn’t be stupid enough to go offNet while 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 suddenly felt uncomfortable. He knew that the penalty for going offNet 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.