by Tracy Deebs
“So what are we supposed to do about this?” Eli asks again. “Dad and Gayle won’t be back from their honeymoon until next week …”
Theo turns to me, and his eyes are such a deep, piercing blue that it feels like he can see right through me. Or worse, into me. “This all started at your house with Pandora’s Box, too?”
“I think so. I mean, nothing was weird before that.” I remember my cell phone suddenly, and how all day today it took a lot longer to text than normal.
“What?” Theo demands.
I tell him and he doesn’t say anything. I’m about to add more, but Eli leans over to me and whispers, “Don’t interrupt. Boy genius at work.”
I start to laugh, but he’s serious, despite his sarcastic tone. “Early acceptance to Harvard,” he tells me. And when I glance back at Theo, I swear I can see his brain working, the wheels turning behind those unfocused eyes. I mean, I’m straight-A, full-load-of-AP-classes smart, and I know Theo is the same. But looking at him now, I can’t help thinking that Eli is right. He’s in a whole different class.
Plus it feels weird to just stand here, watching him, waiting for I don’t know what. Maybe for him to snap and try to kill me again? Fun as that was, I’m going to have to pass. I start to inch away. Better to fall apart at home than here in front of the two hottest (and possibly craziest) guys in school.
Theo snaps out of it before I make it to the top of the stairs. “We need to go to your house.”
“My—” I stop talking because he’s already halfway down the steps, his iPad clutched in one hand, his laptop in the other.
“Is he always like this?” I ask Eli as we follow at a more reasonable pace.
“As long as I’ve known him,” he answers cryptically.
“Lucky you.”
“You have no idea.” He rolls his eyes even as he holds the front door open for me with a gallant flourish.
“Thanks.” I step through, and before I can say anything else, Theo shouts, “Come on, move it! We need to figure out what this is before it’s too late.”
Too late for what? I wonder. But I don’t argue, just pick up the pace. Beside me, Eli does the same, though he mutters something under his breath I can’t quite catch. Not that I blame him. Theo in full-out hunt mode is a bit overwhelming. Scary, even.
“So, what is this?” I ask as we trudge back to my house.
“Some virus,” Eli tells me with a reassuring smile. “We’ll get it figured out.”
Theo snorts.
“You don’t think so?” I ask.
He still doesn’t answer, and I grab his arm, try to get him to look at me. “Something—I don’t know what yet—is taking over the Internet piece by piece, Pandora.” His voice crackles with impatience. “So no, I don’t think we’re going to be able to figure it out on our own.”
“What do you mean?” I demand as a chill works its way up my spine. “It’s just infecting our hardware, right?”
He pulls away, starts walking again. “It’s infecting the whole Internet.”
“That’s not possible,” Eli blurts out, though I can see a little of the concern he’s trying hard to hide. “There’s no way someone could do that.”
“Yeah. No one thought they could take an entire country off the Internet, either, but Egypt managed to do it. Anything’s possible, Eli.”
The uneasiness that’s been riding me since this thing began explodes into full-blown panic. If Theo’s right … if Theo’s right, then it’s only a matter of time before everyone’s infected. Before the entire Internet goes down. Right now, Pandora’s Box is the most popular game in America, and I’m pretty sure the world, too. How many more people have to log on to play before they manage to bring down the whole Net?
“We need to call someone,” I say before I realize how stupid that sounds. Who would we call even if we had that option? And what would we say?
“Trust me, they’ve already figured out there’s a problem,” Theo says without slowing down his brutal pace. “I guarantee you, alarms are sounding somewhere while a bunch of government techies scramble around, trying to figure out how hundreds, thousands, of Internet connections simply vanished.”
“Maybe it’s just our neighborhood,” Eli ventures. But I can tell he doesn’t believe it. Neither do I.
Whoever did this put a lot of time into it. Like thousands of hours for it to take everything down so smoothly. There’s no way that was just to bring down a neighborhood.
We let ourselves into my house, and I go straight to the kitchen to get my laptop for Theo. I’m not sure what he thinks he’s going to get from it, but I’m more than okay with letting him try. When I get back into the family room, he and Eli are parked on the couch, staring at my TV screen. It now has the same message on it that everything else does.
But when Theo opens my laptop, I realize that’s not exactly true. Because scrolling across my screen is a new message, one none of us has seen before:
Beat the game. Save the world.
It comes letter by letter, and once it’s complete it hangs out for a second so that we can read it. Then it flashes three times and disappears, only to start all over again, one letter at a time:
B.E.A.T. T.H.E. G.A.M.E. S.A.V.E. T.H.E. W.O.R.L.D.
It does this four times, and when it fades the last time, it doesn’t start again. Instead, a tiny little speck appears in the middle of the screen. As I watch, fascinated and horrified at the same time, the speck grows larger and larger until it takes up the entire screen.
“It’s a present,” I say dumbly, staring at the gift-wrapped box.
“No shit, Sherlock,” responds Theo, even as he opens Eli’s laptop and then his own. Theirs haven’t changed at all—the same point-of-no-return message is still scrawled across both their screens.
“So, why is mine different?” I demand, now more freaked out than ever.
“Maybe it’s because you’ve been infected longer,” Eli suggests. “The gift thing just evolved on yours, right?”
I nod, certain that it hadn’t been there when I’d gone running next door.
“If we give ours a little longer, maybe it will look the same.” He glances at Theo.
“I don’t think so. Pandora was only at our house a few minutes before you logged on. If we were going to get that message, we would have by now.”
“So, again, what is going on?” Eli demands. “This doesn’t make any sense. I thought most computer viruses worked the same way: infect a computer and use its address book to spread to other computers. But what they do to each computer is the same, right? As they replicate? They can’t change.”
“Usually,” Theo agrees. “But this isn’t a virus. I think it’s a worm.”
“What’s the difference?” I start to pace behind the couch. It’s a nervous habit that drives my mother nuts, but she’s not here and I’m too worried to sit still.
“A virus usually piggybacks on some kind of program and replicates itself,” Eli tells me. “A worm can use whole computer networks to replicate at a much higher rate.”
“So this is inside a network we both use? Anyone who accesses it—”
“Gets the worm.” Theo completes my sentence. “But the thing about a worm is it has different components that allow it to move from one network to the next. In the time since you first got the message, this thing could have gone around the world several times.”
“That still doesn’t account for the separate messages.” I’m trying to keep up, but it’s hard.
“No, it doesn’t.” Theo turns away from the computer for the first time. “Unless you’re the point of origin. Then it makes perfect sense.”
“The point of …” My voice fails me, and I just stare at him, horror wrapping itself around me until I can’t breathe, can’t think. “That’s not possible.”
“You sure about that?” He taps the graphic of the present on the screen, the present that isn’t on his or Eli’s computers. Suddenly, I remember the message that scrolle
d across my screen first, the one that preceded even the Pandora’s Box message:
Happy Seventeenth Birthday, Pandora!
My stomach twists and churns, and for a moment I’m afraid I’m going to be sick. Is this possible? I wonder frantically. Could all this have somehow started with me?
It’s a ridiculous idea, moronic. I don’t know much about technology beyond the basics of how to use things. There’s no way I could set off something this sophisticated, even if I wanted to. Which I totally didn’t. Don’t. Whatever.
And yet, when I look at Theo, he seems so sure. So calm. As if he’s already got everything all figured out.
“I didn’t do this.” I turn to Eli, urging him to believe me. But he’s too busy trying to get into his laptop to even notice that I’m looking at him.
Nothing he does works, though, and finally Theo says, “You’re just wasting your time. You’re completely locked out until the system decides to let us in. We all are. Except Pandora.”
“That doesn’t make any sense! How am I supposed to know anything more than anyone else does?” I demand. “What am I supposed to do?”
Theo, who’s stayed completely calm during my tantrum, finally raises one dark eyebrow at my last question, and it makes him look less cerebral, more dangerous. Reminds me of those moments in English class. I take a couple of steps back even as he says, “The only thing you can do.”
“What does that mean?”
He taps the screen once more. “Open the box, Pandora.”
6
I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with my name (I’m convinced my parents were drunk when they named me), but as Theo and Eli stare at me and I stare at the box in the middle of the computer screen, I have never hated it more.
Open the box, Pandora. Theo’s words echo in my head, make me tremble.
Make me sick.
Make me wish I was anywhere but right here, in my house, feeling like the harbinger of total and complete destruction.
The words set a fire inside me—a burning, destructive blaze that does a lot of things. But the one thing it doesn’t do, the one thing Theo can’t make me do, is walk any closer to that computer and the mouse he is even now holding out.
“Why me?” I ask the question that has been circling my brain since Theo first said he thought I was the point of origin. “What did I do to make someone target me for this?”
“Who knows?” He shrugs, looking so carelessly unconcerned with the question that is tormenting me that I want to punch him. “Maybe nothing. It could be your profile, your user name, something about your account that set it off. Maybe it’s your name that did it.”
“Or my birthday?” I whisper.
“Today’s your birthday?” Eli demands.
“Yes.”
The three of us look at my computer, at the virtual present in the middle of the screen. “Well, maybe it’s that simple, then,” Theo says. “Maybe it looked for users with today’s birth date and launched from there. In that case, you won’t be the only one this is happening to.” He waves the mouse around. “So let’s get started already.”
“Wait a minute!” Eli says. “What’s to say that she won’t make it worse if she opens the box? Maybe we should just wait it out, let them fix the phones and the TV.”
Theo looks at him then. “What are you even doing here?”
“Screw you. You think I’m going to stay at home while you hang out with Pandora and save the day?”
Theo reaches behind him to the phone resting on the table that runs the length of the couch. Clicks on speaker-phone. There’s nothing there. “They’re not going to be able to fix the phones, Eli. Whoever did this has seized control of the whole grid, and he or she isn’t letting it go until the game gets launched. Otherwise, things would be back to normal already. And even if it does get worse, there’s no way to fix it until Pandora unlocks the game.”
“How do you know that?” I ask, my voice almost manic. “If what you’re saying is even possible, then won’t it go away if we just don’t play? If we refuse to do anything?”
Theo’s laugh is anything but happy as he turns his computer to face me. “Worms don’t work that way. They sit there, gathering info and doing what they’re supposed to do, until someone blasts them apart.
“Besides, did you even read what the game said? ‘The real Pandora’s Box’? ‘Total annihilation in ten days’?” Then he points to my computer. “‘Beat the game. Save the world.’”
“You can’t actually be taking that seriously, can you? It can’t actually annihilate the entire world.”
I’ve barely finished speaking when the lights go out, plunging the room into shades of purple that echo the inky twilight slowly falling outside. I swallow the scream building in my throat—I already look like a big enough idiot without turning phobic because of the dark—and look around. The only light in the room is coming from the three laptops spread out on the coffee table.
“Time’s up,” says Eli, who’s looking around the room like he expects the bogeyman to jump out at him at any second. I’m right there with him.
“No.” Theo ignores his brother and answers me. “I don’t actually think the guy who did this can take out the whole world. But I think he can make life pretty damn uncomfortable for our little corner of it until you decide to go along with him.”
I look at the screen and I’m tempted. I can’t say that I’m not. My curiosity is fully piqued, and there’s a part of me that wants to know what’s waiting for me, waiting for us, inside that box. Will everything go back to normal if I just click it? Or will everything get worse?
Theo holds the mouse out to me and I reach for it. But at the last minute, I summon up a little bit of self-control and turn away. “I don’t care. I’m not doing it.”
I walk into the kitchen, grab a bottle of water from the fridge, and guzzle it down. My stomach is killing me, and even though I’m in another room, all I can see is that present. That box. Waiting for me to open it.
But I’ve learned from my namesake’s mistakes. I won’t be the Pandora Theo wants me to be. There’s enough evil in the world already.
“Damn it, Pandora! We don’t have time for this.” Theo’s standing in the doorway, my laptop in his hands. “Open the damn thing or I will!”
“Why? Why can’t I just refuse to play?”
He looks around the darkened kitchen. “Because this is happening whether you want it to or not. It’s stupid of you to keep out everyone who can help just because you’re scared.”
“I’m not scared!” It’s a total lie, but I feel honor bound to say it.
The look he gives me calls me a liar, but he doesn’t say anything. Just waits. Patiently. Which is somehow much worse than when he was pushing me.
“You really think you can help?” I finally venture after a long silence.
“This is what I do,” he answers.
“Play video games?”
He lifts an eyebrow. “Hack systems.”
I look at him, standing there in his button-down shirt and khaki pants and can’t imagine him as anything but a rule follower of the highest order. I mean, even his shoes are perfectly polished. But then I make the mistake of meeting his eyes, and they’re not cold anymore. Instead, they’re totally bad ass. Filled with confidence and the thrill of the chase. There’s no sign of the sickness that’s churning inside me.
Again … “You really think you can do this?”
“Damn straight.”
Eli comes up to us then, and he looks a little excited—as if he, too, is actually looking forward to getting inside and playing with this monstrosity some crazed hacker has created. “Come on, Pandora. How could they get worse? Besides, what if they get better?”
It’s an enticing thought. I look at my laptop, think about doing what they ask. I don’t want to. For the first time, ever, I’m refusing to let my curiosity control me.
Sure, it seems like things are bad now. They are bad, but a little voice
in the back of my head tells me that we don’t have a clue what bad is. Not yet. And I just couldn’t stand it if I somehow made things worse.
I think of my mom, of how annoyed she’ll be in Alaska tonight if she tries to reach me and can’t get through. How worried she’ll be, how worried Theo and Eli’s parents will be on their honeymoon, if this thing continues to spiral out of control.
And that’s when I know—I’m going to click on the box.
I’m going to play the game.
Because when it comes right down to it, Theo’s right. I don’t have a choice. Some madman has seen to that.
I take another deep breath, hold it in my lungs, then bring my laptop back to the family room. I don’t look at it, don’t look at anything, until I’m once more settled on the couch. And then I move the cursor over the box and double-click before I can change my mind.
7
For a few seconds, nothing happens. Then everything does, all at the same time. The lights come back on, Theo’s and Eli’s laptops beep from the other room, and mine—mine starts to play music—a full-orchestra version of “Happy Birthday” that is totally inappropriate, considering the circumstances.
“Told you,” Eli says, looking at the lights. “We’ve got electricity back.”
Theo doesn’t seem as happy with that development as Eli does, but when I start to ask, he shushes me. Points to my laptop, which has begun talking to us.
“Welcome to Pandora’s Box, the most real game you’ll ever play.” The voice that comes out is female and so overly sweet it makes me want to gag. It’s also completely unexpected and as I listen to it, I wonder what other surprises Pandora’s Box has in store for me. The thought weirds me out even more, and somehow Eli knows, because suddenly he’s behind me, his big hand rubbing the tension from between my shoulder blades.
“Evil is everywhere. Your only hope is to fix what’s broken. Complete the given tasks to level up. Beat the game and find the key to a brave new world. Lose the game and life as you know it will come to an end forever. But be warned: this world is modeled after the real one. No matter how many points you amass or levels you conquer, you can only die once. There are no second chances.”
